This Pendent Heart
by LunaSphere
Summary: When the story ends, almost everyone in Goldcrown Town forgets that their lives had once been turned upside down by a story, that there had ever been a girl named Duck at all. When Duck herself begins to forget, Fakir writes a story that costs him dearly.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** So, it took 3 years, but this fic is finally over! If it weren't for **Mangaka-chan**'s betaing and encouragement to continue, the second half of this fic would have been written even more slowly. I also want to thank her for her offer to collaborate and we're excited to present This Pendent Heart, the light novel. Each chapter is illustrated beautifully by Mangaka-chan (remove all spaces and punctuate accordingly): ** sites (dot) google (dot) com (slash) site (slash) thispendentheart** The site will be updated with new illustrated chapters regularly. I've also uploaded the revised versions of the earlier chapters on FFN, so don't be surprised if you find new scenes, chapter divisions and such in them, but I would really recommend checking them out on the website because Mangaka-chan's art is just stunning (also check out her deviant art page at ** mangaka-chan (dot) deviantart (dot) com**).

A big thank you to **Moon Shadow Magic** for her untiring, patient help with betaing for revision. She's helped me make this story presentable and I really appreciate all the time and effort she put into doing so. All mistakes that remain are, of course, my own.

And I want to thank all of you for reading and leaving feedback and encouragement and inspiration. I don't know if I would have managed to write it all out otherwise. Hope you enjoyed the ride.

So long, and thanks for all the fish,  
LunaSphere

* * *

**Summary:** When the story ends, almost everyone in Goldcrown Town forgets that their lives had once been turned upside down by a story, that there had ever been a girl named Duck at all. When Duck herself begins to forget, Fakir finds himself forced to write a story that costs him dearly.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Princess Tutu or any quoted/cited materials.

* * *

_Once upon a time, there was a poet who tried to drink his sorrow, hoping that if he contained it in his veins, it could not drown him. He watched the moon as it shifted petal by petal by petal like a swollen rose in the lake._

_The universe lay at his feet, and he watched stars dance on the waves of space, as light does on water. But stars and space did not matter. To embrace the moon, he thought and reached with arms open._

_He could not hold it, that moon as soft and formless as water. It swallowed him, and he died by poetry. Wanting to grasp the beauty of the moon, he found only a silky drowning embrace. (1)**  
**_

* * *

Fakir was miserable because Duck was not. No, he had no illusions about himself: he knew he was a selfish bastard. He was not selfless enough to be content in her contentment, to find comfort in the fact that she was taking her reversion back into a duck so well. It was all good and well for the Prince and Princess to leave behind humdrum reality, for the townspeople—who hadn't even been as deeply mired in Drosselmeyer's _The Prince and the Raven_—to forget the entire nightmare. The burden of memory had been bearable at first because he'd known he wasn't alone—Duck too shouldered it with him. But that too had changed.

When Duck first returned to being a duck, of course Fakir had grieved at losing the lively red-haired girl she had been. But she had been and would always be the one who had healed him, who had saved them all. Girl, duck, it didn't matter he told himself, and believed it except sometimes in the darkest hours of the night, when she slumbered in her nest of blankets and he stared mindlessly at his ceiling, haunted by memories of the girl she had been, the carefree laughter, the awkward grace, and always, always that unceasing chatter.

But she was still _Duck_ and so he could live with things the way they were now he told himself firmly even as his heart ached because with each passing day those memories of her became slightly hazier, paler. And then, somehow, as if his own troubled thoughts had woken her, she would quack sleepily, inquiringly from her makeshift nest and he would grouse at her to just go back to sleep, but would feel his own heart eased, his own worries soothed: she was still Duck and nothing in the world could change that.

Of course he stayed beside her as he had promised and they happily spent endless hours in each other's company. He made certain the bathtub was always full of water so she could swim around if she felt the need, and kept his pockets perpetually stocked with bread. She sat in a little basket lined with a soft blanket on his desk and would peer over his arm as he worked at the stories Drosselmeyer had left unfinished or hopelessly tangled. They took walks together, Fakir slowing his pace to match Duck's slow waddling, and often in the evenings, he read aloud to her while he tried to find in other novels, books, and poems hints on the art of writing so he could improve his own attempts at fixing Drosselmeyer's foolishness.

Fakir didn't have much experience with writing, let alone with spinning tales into reality, and so finishing the stories was slow, tedious work. As often as not, what he wrote didn't change reality at all. Through trial and error he learned that spinning tales had as much to do with the emotion and intention he put into the piece of writing as it did with the quality of the work. Naturally, shoddy writing reflected that he hadn't spent much time on it, and if he didn't spend much time on it, it wouldn't have much of his intention and desire for it to become real in it. He soon realized he needed to learn how to write well, and to do so, he had even stopped attending Goldcrown Academy for the Fine Arts.

He had a new goal in his life and dance didn't seem to fit into it. Besides, it took away from the time he could spend with Duck since pets were not allowed in the building—an ironic injunction considering that the previous instructor and the accompanist had both been animals. But of course no one remembered that.

In short, for those first months after she had transformed back into a duck, the two were inseparable. Of course, she couldn't communicate with him directly, but intelligence and understanding shone in her eyes when he talked to her, and often she would quack heartily or nod or shake her head in response to what he said. Granted it was only one half of communication—she could understand everything he said and he could understand only a fraction of the things she wanted to convey, but well, he could live with that if she could. And just living was enough.

* * *

Charon had slowly grown accustomed to his son's affection for his new pet; he couldn't understand why the little duck meant so much to the boy, but if it was one of the few things that could make Fakir happy, Charon wasn't going to object. Of course Charon had been upset when Fakir dropped out of that school for no reason, but he couldn't get the boy to budge on that point at all. Every time he tried, the boy just shrugged off Charon's words before he could even really begin. To abandon ballet so suddenly after years of training and hard work, it made no sense to Charon. He couldn't figure out what drove Fakir anymore. Maybe he was just at that age.

But in the face of Fakir's stubbornness, Charon had decided to let things be for the time being—it was clear that Fakir wasn't merely lazing around the house; he was deeply involved in some project and spent an inordinate amount of money on books. As long as Fakir was trying to do something with his life, Charon found that he didn't mind much. For the time being.

* * *

As weeks turned to months and months to nearly a year, Fakir finally began to notice a change so gradual in Duck's behavior that at first he dismissed it as his imagination. But as time passed, there was no denying that she responded less and less to his words until one day, well into winter, he noticed that she didn't nod or shake her head at his comments at all anymore.

He had come home in a foul mood, stomping into his room, tossing the books he carried onto his bed. "How could anyone else possibly need a centuries-old book on rhetoric?" Fakir demanded angrily as Duck scurried out of the way of his frantic pacing. "The damned fool who checked it out probably doesn't even know how to read! How am I supposed to finish that story without it? I don't even know why I—" he grumbled over Duck's furious squawking at having been so unceremoniously startled, her quiet afternoon upturned into chaos.

As she continued her quacking upbraiding of him, he could not shake the feeling that she was responding only to the anger in his voice, as an animal understood human emotion from the tone rather than the content of what was being said. And the awful suspicion that she had lost the ability to understand human speech began to seep into his mind. He stopped mid-stride, mid-sentence, the rant, the book, the story forgotten. His hands fell limply to his sides, useless, powerless as anger gave way to a sudden, awful fear that seemed to erase all his thoughts.

But the little duck merely fluttered her wings in lingering irritation at him, settling into her basket as if nothing were wrong at all. Somehow, her unconcern, that casual preening of her feathers, snapped him back to himself a little and the overwhelming dread that had threatened to consume him settled like an uncomfortable stone in the pit of his stomach. He forced himself to face her, to say in as steady a voice as he could, "I know this sounds stupid Duck, but I need you to nod your head if you understand what I'm saying."

The duck merely tilted her head to the side curiously and peered up at him before returning to preening. The stone of dread grew heavier. "This is serious, you idiot!" The anger rose in his voice. "Nod your head if you can understand me!" The duck quacked sharply and waddled out of her basket with a huff of annoyance.

With growing desperation, Fakir called to her retreating yellow form, "Stop! Duck, please, just stop and turn around if you understand what I'm saying! I'm begging you." But despite the pleading edge in his voice, the duck merely continued on her way out of his room without once looking back.

* * *

Duck waddled away sadly from the loud human whose yelling was starting to hurt her ears. She knew he was only making all that noise because he was in some sort of terrible pain, but she couldn't for the life of her understand _why_. He didn't look like he was injured; she didn't see any blood or anything. He wanted something, she thought, the way his cries were filled with pain and desperation…and despair, yes that was it, despair.

But she did not know how to help him because she couldn't even see what it was that had hurt him. She could not stand the sight of him in such pain, though. All she could do was waddle away and try to fetch the other older human who lived here. After all, the man probably had a better idea of what was wrong since he could understand the boy and would be able to help.

The little yellow duck looked all over the house but it seemed that the man wasn't anywhere to be found. At last, she decided to return to the room where she had left her shouting human. Although she couldn't really understand why, she felt that she should know him, that she should feel like she had known him forever, that there was a deep bond between them forged slowly and painfully, one she could not bear to lose.

She found his room a war zone on her return: papers were scattered everywhere, books lay on the floor tossed aside as useless and what looked like the remains of an inkstand and ink pooled on the floor in one corner. The duck-feather quill he always wrote with lay perfectly untouched and unharmed on the desk as it always did when he wasn't using it.

His back was to her as he sat in the bay window looking outside and for some reason she was struck with the thought that he was a knight. Her knight. That sounded much better than her human. She puzzled over the strange word, not entirely sure what it meant or even why she thought it belonged to him. But the word, like the boy before her, gave her a feeling of strength, of protection, of kindness, and "her knight" seemed to fit him so perfectly that she couldn't think of him any other way. And yet, as he hunched there before the window, there was nothing particularly strong or protective or even kind about his posture, only a sort of brokenness in every line. Even so, somehow she knew he was all those things, would break himself to be all of them.

Again Duck had the nagging feeling she'd had now for weeks, even months, that she had been forgetting something important, something that meant all the world to her, but it had happened so long ago…She should know more about him than the mere fact that he was the human who took care of her and fed her. She should be able to remember that he was much more to her than that, but no matter how hard she tried, the thoughts slipped away, shapeless, formless, like mist on a lake.

On waddling closer to him, Duck could see the silent tracks of tears running down his face as he gazed mindlessly at his faint reflection in the glass. That expression too—the tears, the slump of defeat in his shoulders—gave her the same uneasy feeling, as if she had seen this before, as if she should remember something.

She wished she could help him, that she could ease his suffering, whatever caused it. But all she could do was give a little fluttering hop onto the seat of the bay window and then onto his lap. Duck looked up at him, her blue eyes brimming with compassion and tried to offer him all the comfort she could.

* * *

Fakir gazed down at the little duck that had somehow found her way into his arms and was looking up at him with worried tears welling in her eyes. He was reminded of the moment when he had gone to the small pond by the smithy with his despair at failing to protect the prince, at being found unworthy of Lohengrin's sword by Charon. She had seen him then at his worst, seen him when he couldn't have sunk any lower and had never thought less of him for that weakness.

"You're seeing me in a worthless state," he whispered, echoing his words from back then. He was jabbing at a wound to feel the pain, for even as he said the words he knew that Duck most likely neither remembered nor understood what he had just said to her.

In her absence, after his pleas for her to turn around had failed, he'd calmed long enough to try to figure out what had happened. And the answer that came to him was as simple as it was sinister. She had transformed back into a duck when she gave up the last shard of the Prince's heart and ever since then she must have been in the process of turning back into a duck entirely. Animals, after all, even the most intelligent ones, couldn't understand the intricacies of human speech, could only grasp a small fragment of it. And ducks, most likely, didn't have much call for long term memory in the same ways humans did either. All the complex memories she had formed as Princess Tutu and as Duck must have slowly been fading from her mind until only the most basic and simple ones remained.

It was all painfully clear in hindsight. He remembered how, soon after she had returned to being a duck, they would walk to her pond. He would on occasion dance on the shore as she swam, and every time, she would leave the water to join him. Somehow she managed to pirouette even on webbed feet. And every time he was left in nothing but awe and admiration of her grace even though when she had been human those words could only have applied to Princess Tutu's ballet, never to Duck's.

But he could not remember the last time they had danced together. The past few times, she had merely swum nearby, watching him with interest, but not coming towards shore. At the time he had thought that perhaps she was merely tired, or maybe even losing her interest in ballet. He certainly was, and as it had been half a year since he had attended the Academy, there was no longer the pressing need to practice hours on end each day to keep up his form. Since she was participating less and less often, he had let their impromptu _pas de deux_ lapse without a thought to what it might mean that Duck, who had adored ballet with her heart for as long as he had known her, no longer wanted to dance.

How could he have failed to notice that all the skills she had learned as a girl were disappearing? How? How could he have failed her? He should have noticed, should have done _something_ before it was too late, before—. And the truth of it had struck him like a physical blow: she wasn't Duck any longer, but rather merely a duck. Her humanity had faded away.

That was when he had taken his rage out on his books and his writing. It was all worthless. Everything was worthless if Duck too had forgotten their battle with the Raven, their struggles, their despair and their hope, if she had forgotten him, if he had lost her. He stormed at the unfairness of a life which destined him for nothing but loss. Would there never be an end to it? He had already lost his parents to the Raven. He had already lost the prince to whom he had sworn allegiance, sworn to protect at all cost. Even though Mythos' story had ended happily, hadn't he still lost his closest friend to Drosselmeyer's story, because in the end a fairytale prince could not dwell in everyday reality? Hadn't he already mastered the art of losing well enough, losing further, losing faster? he wondered bitterly. _(2)_

But when all his rage had passed, the sorrow stayed. He did not know how long he sat at the window gazing blindly, when he was shaken out of his stupor by a sudden, slight weight settling in his arms and he looked down into Duck's worried blue eyes. She was watching him so intently he could see the reflection of his own tears in her eyes.

Surely she must remember something of him, something of herself, to gaze at him with such concern. He buried his face in her feathers as he held her gently.

* * *

Things only worsened over the next few weeks. Fakir could see Duck beginning to languish at living indoors and often found her looking out the window as skeins of geese and ducks filled the sky, returning with the spring. She was even starting to go off her food a little. He supposed it was only natural since she was a wild duck and not a domesticated one. She had spent most of her life at the pond out in the woods, not cooped up in some house.

It broke his heart, but when spring fully arrived and the weather gentled, he went for a walk with her to the pond and paused by its shore. Kneeling before her, he looked into her eyes and said in a voice with only a slight quaver in it, "Duck, you're free." He walked away without once looking back.

As she watched the figure of her knight become smaller and smaller on her horizon, the little duck wanted to follow him. He meant so much to her for some reason that she could no longer remember. But just the thought of being closed in by the four walls of that house made her feel so trapped that she didn't think she could bear it. She felt so listless when all she had was that bathtub to swim in, its porcelain sides holding barely a puddle of water that tortured her with the taste of freedom. She would waste away if she had to stay there any longer.

And yet, she could feel her heart tremble with each step her knight took away from her.

* * *

Fakir returned to Duck's pond every day, sitting on the pier from dawn to dusk with a writing pad on his knee as he watched Duck idle around near the supports of the pier as if wanting to be close to him. He spent as much time with her as he could.

But now each hour, each minute, each second they spent together was haunted by the knowledge that she most likely didn't remember him anymore and she certainly didn't understand him any more than he could understand her. He felt like he was trying to love the memory of who Duck had been but no longer was. Yet something of the girl he once knew must have remained. Somewhere buried deep in her, surely, was some small memory of him, wasn't there?

For her part, Duck was more overjoyed than she could express when she saw her knight come back the next day and the next and the next. She quacked happily and spun delighted figures in the water. She had been afraid that he had abandoned her, but now she chided herself for doubting him. Somehow, she felt that she should know better than to think he would break his promise. But what promise was that? Had he made her a promise? She couldn't remember….

* * *

Fakir wrote desperately now, trying to turn Duck back into a girl once more. But even so, he felt terribly conflicted about it. If she turned into a girl once more, would she regain all that she had lost in her time as a duck? Or was that part of her mind irrevocably gone? Would she remember him if she were human once more? Would she be the same Duck he had known, the same vivacious girl who had befriended him in spite of himself, or would she be someone else entirely?

Would it be kinder to her to simply leave her as she was? Did she even _want_ to be a girl anymore if she didn't even remember being one? Could he write back her memories? Did he even have that right? Was it fair to ask her to carry the painful memories of her past once more? The memories of having to give up her love, of having to sacrifice any chance of that love? Could all the good memories possibly compensate for all the pain?

And because he was so riddled with doubt, no matter how many pages he wrote, no matter how frantically he wrote, the words refused to come to life. They remained dead on the page.

* * *

Charon noticed the gloom that had begun to surround his son ever since his pet started to do poorly and he let her go by the duck pond. Fakir was spending far too much time out there. Such an obsession couldn't possibly be healthy. What was wrong with the boy?

It was just a duck after all. Charon was at a loss. After all, Fakir was no longer a child, and would most likely bristle at anything he perceived as an invasion into his life. Not for the first time in his life, Charon couldn't decide what to do.

* * *

One evening as he walked back from Duck's pond long after sunset, as morose as always, Fakir bumped into a swaying figure that seemed to be teetering about the empty nighttime streets of Goldcrown Town. As he helped the older woman up, he could see that she was still grinning widely despite having been knocked to the ground.

Suddenly, even though he knew it was irrational, he was furious with her. He was drowning in his own misery and hopelessness, in the bitterness of the hand Fate had dealt him, a hand it seemed he could not change even with his ability to spin tales into reality. He was losing a friend to a fate that was like living death.

He had foolishly thought Drosselmeyer merely meant that Duck would lose her human form for her animal one if she gave up that final heartshard, but it was much worse than that. She was disappearing after all—not in an instant, not in a flash of light, but slowly day by day, the girl he knew was fading out of existence. How could the world continue as always, how could anyone, how could this woman, be happy when he was filled with so much misery that he felt his pain should drown even the sun?

Which is why, with an angry scowl, he snarled at her, "What the hell are you smiling about?"

This merely elicited a giggle from the woman, eve as her careworn face and empty eyes belied her smile. She slurred, " 'Cause I've given up all my shorrows." Her declaration was followed by a hiccup and another inane grin.

With her words, all his anger turned to intense jealousy. This woman had achieved all he wanted. Gripping her shoulders, holding her up as much as her own legs were supporting her, he demanded, "How?" In response, she pointed vaguely behind her and then jerked herself out of his grip and ambled off unsteadily.

Fakir followed the general direction she had pointed in, and at the end of the quiet street, he found a building that cast squares of light from its windows onto the ground outside. He could hear the bustling within. A battered wooden sign read _Lethe Tavern_.

_Lethe_, Fakir thought, _the river of forgetfulness_. Taking it as a good omen, he entered and joined the tables of drunken men and women. After all, he had always been nothing more than a coward and worse than useless.

* * *

_(1) A loose account of the death of Chinese poet Li Po_

_(2) Paraphrase from Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"_


	2. Chapter 2

_Once upon a time there was a dancing girl who loved a prince. Or perhaps there was a prince who loved a dancing girl. In any case, she was as beautiful as a pomegranate blossom—an unexpected speck of crimson glittering like blood among dark glossy leaves. _

_She sang as the enraged king had her buried alive for presuming to love his son. Powerless, the prince wept into his hands. (1)_

* * *

"Your majesty," a guard bowed and stepped back at his prince's nod, and Mythos climbed up that last spiraling staircase of the highest tower of New Swan Stone castle alone._(2)_ Stepping up to the parapet, he felt blinded by light.

The castle rose out of the land like a delicate white bird, poised to take flight at any moment. Wind blew in clean swift bursts past the battlement, sweeping his cloak behind him, brushing back pale strands of hair from his forehead as he surveyed his kingdom: the land stretched before him, gently rolling hills and fields, patches of forest, a landscape of marked beauty and tranquility.

It was like an impossible dream, this peace. He had fought the Raven so long, traveled barren lands, and suffered so, always searching, always seeking, ever since he had set out on his quest to battle the Monster Raven until he lost his heart and himself to it. Long before he had ever stepped foot in Goldcrown Town, he had already been battling against the Raven for endless years.

But if the kingdom itself seemed a dream too good to be true, all his memories felt like nightmares, disjointed and dark and terrifying. Had that truly been him, so raven-hearted and foul? Had that truly been him, wanting to devour the hearts of others and leave them to the same misery the Raven had once reduced him to? Surely those had been other hands that had tried to hurt Rätsel and so many others. Surely those had been other lips that had torn Rue to shreds with barbed words. Surely that had been another heart that had wanted to still the beating of all others.

A part of him recoiled still at the thought, unable to reconcile itself with his actions, just as when those final fragments of his heart had been released from the gates of Goldcrown and seen just what he had become: a raven masquerading as a prince. He had fallen so far that at first his own heart could not recognize him, had changed so much that the unsullied fragments of his heart had disdained him.

And what dark dreams he had still! An unaccountable shudder ran through his frame in this seasonable warmth. He remembered, in his dreams, the powerful feel of raven wings in place of arms, the headiness of hearts offered him as his due, and would wake gasping in fear. In desire. It sickened him more than he could bear. Only steady breathing and the concern of waking her up could anchor him, could draw him out of the dark labyrinth of memory and still his shudders.

As he considered the idyllic landscape before him, he wondered if he was the only thing of darkness in this light-filled land. Would he spread the taint of the raven within him to his realm, as pristine and innocent as he had once been himself? Could he overcome the raven's blood, change the shape of his heart back to what it had been so very long ago?

He heard the rustle of silk on stone behind him, and turned to find Rue emerging from the tower, a hand raised to shade her eyes from the sudden brightness. "Mythos? Your courtiers are all in a flutter without their prince." There was nothing but simple inquiry in her voice, and yet he could not see her eyes and it made him uneasy. He wondered just what she saw when she looked at him—did she still catch glimpses of the broken doll he had been once in her and Fakir's care or of the raven who had taunted her? Could she see that the monster lurked within him still?

He wished he could bury the doubt, the fear, the horror of the memories and everything related to them so deep that even he couldn't find them. As he faced her, he was glad for the sun at his back, his face hidden from her; it was easier to hide with words than with eyes. "Shall we, my princess?" he asked offering her his arm with the casual elegance of a prince.

Rue looked up at him a space, and he feared for a moment that she could somehow read all the fears that had been racing through his mind, that perhaps all those nights, she lay awake beside him. But then she merely tucked her hand into the velvet-clad crook of his elbow and they made their way back down that steep, winding staircase neither willing to break the silence between them.

* * *

From the way his head ached so fiercely, Fakir wondered if he had spent all night banging it against his bedroom wall instead of sleeping. He burrowed deeper into the blanket, grateful that Charon had not come to wake him yet. The bed felt oddly hard and uncomfortable but since that was the least of his problems, he merely drifted back into sleep again.

He awoke once more, the pain slightly subdued, and wondered at the stench that seemed to be emanating from all around him. He opened one bleary eye, threw away the dark blue fabric that was enveloping him, and realized that he had been resting his head against a bag of garbage. Flies buzzed around him lazily and mosquitoes swarmed above a filthy mud puddle to his left. It was the most complete picture of squalor that he could have imagined. Apparently he had never made it home last night, and instead was lying in a back street surrounded by trash.

As he lay there wondering what course of action he should adopt next—anything more than lying in a daze required too much energy—the screeching of a pair of harpies set his head aching again. He withdrew further into the darkness of the alley and watched as two girls wearing Goldcrown Academy uniforms approached while talking at an alarming rate. They looked oddly familiar, one with dark pink hair and the other blonde. Somehow, they seemed much too large, their figures too distorted as if he were looking up at them from quite a distance. They also looked like they didn't have one thought between the two of them. Right, they were Duck's old friends, weren't they?

"Hey, what's this?" The pink one asked, retrieving the dark blue fabric which Fakir had tossed into the main street—his shirt Fakir realized as she picked it up and shook it out.

"Oohhhh!" the second squealed gleefully, examining the article of clothing. Her voice was much more painful. "Maybe there was a terrible fight! I hope no one ended up getting brutally _maimed_!" She sounded rather overjoyed at the prospect of violence.

"There's something in the pocket!" Pink responded. "Ew. It looks like a bunch of rubbish," she said, rummaging in the pocket and pulling out a wad of crumpled papers. "And it stinks."

Angry at their presumption at rifling through his possessions, Fakir rushed out and snatched the papers from the girl's impertinent hands. But when he opened his mouth to verbally tear both of them apart, his voice came out in a series of hoarse inhuman noises. It was then that Fakir realized that everything was not as it should be.

"Ahhhhh!" Pink screamed while beating a hasty retreat. "I think it bit me!"

"Oh no! I'm sure you won't catch any horrible disease! Do you feel a little ill? Maybe a fever?" her friend inquired, trailing after her.

Now that the two idiots had exited stage left, perhaps he could hope to figure out just what the hell was going on. His head still pounded viciously and putting up with their antics had not helped. Fakir lifted his hands up to his forehead and failed to encounter the fingers he expected. His vision sharpened just as his mind seemed to drown in a surreal haze. Somehow, still numb from shock he managed to stumble towards the mud puddle, partially expecting and fully dreading the reflection that stared back at him dumbly.

Instead of a human figure, the image the muddy water threw back at him was that of a little slate grey duck with black webbed feet and beak. It was unmistakably his reflection—the feathers on his head vaguely resembled his human hair, his perpetually frowning eyebrows were the same as before, and his razor-sharp green gaze looked as derisive as always although now it was dulled with a blooming panic.

He fell back on his feathered behind in shock with all the gracelessness of tumbling in the mid-leap.

_How…?_ was the closest his brain could come to a coherent thought in those first few moments. Was another tale at work? Had Drosselmeyer returned from the dead once more in order to wreak revenge and havoc? Had Fakir, like Duck, been a duck all along and now was reassuming his original form? Realizing that hysteria and madness were creeping into his thoughts, Fakir clamped down firmly on the panic and scrambled towards the wad of crumpled papers he had snatched from the pink-haired harpy in hopes of finding a clue.

On unfolding the scraps carefully, he realized they were merely dirty paper napkins and almost threw them away in disgust before seeing that each piece was covered with his own scrawls. Even the handwriting attested to his state of drunkenness at the time of composition. His usual small and crabbed writing was reeling about the page uncertainly, the lines nowhere approaching straight and the letters shifting size in the middle of words.

There was a lot of drunken rambling, some illegible scrawls and the only thing that approached coherence were a handful of phrases. He made out the beginning of a sentence on the third napkin: "He didn't want her to lose" the rest of line descended into chaos, crossed out repeatedly and decorated liberally with blots of ink. Fakir squinted at the words and guessed one of those blots said "her humanity" but it could as easily have been "humbug". And then there was nearly a page of babbling about how the lake was lonely and memories building in the concentric rings of an oak tree. Just when Fakir was about to toss away the scribbling as a hopeless waste of time, another phrase approached lucidity: "And so he decided to give his humanity to her."

He did not know how long he stared at that line. Is that what had happened? Was Duck human, then, and this the price?

Fakir jerked the paper away from his face in surprise. All of a sudden, it felt like his face was dissolving in a prickling heat.

He raised a hand to his eyes in a futile attempt to ward off the blasted sun and opened his eye into the direct glare of a sunbeam. His hand. He brought it even closer to his eyes and stared at each finger as if he had never seen them before. It had all been a dream.

He tried to look around himself, but stopped as his head reeled from the pain of sudden movement. Turning more slowly, he found himself fallen against bags of garbage in a back alley; he reeked of stale beer, sweat, smoke, and the trash he was wallowing in. Well, that part of his dream, at least, had been accurate.

The arm he had been lying on all night was asleep; he tugged it out from under his body, grimacing from the sensation of pins and needles racing through it. There was something clutched tightly in his fist—a wad of dirty napkins. His heartbeat sped up. Gingerly, he unfolded the flimsy scraps of paper, smoothing them out carefully. But there was no drunken story scribbled there that would transform him or Duck. That too had been a figment of his drink and sleep-addled imagination.

Instead, each and every one of the scraps had the same thing scrawled in a childish hand. "Duck," he read, over and over and over again.

Oddly disappointed, he staggered out of the depths of the alley and began stumbling his way home, disdainfully ignoring the stares of disapproval from onlookers at his disheveled appearance. What did any of that matter to him?

* * *

_(1) Based on the Indian legend of Anarkali_

_(2) Based on Neuschwanstein Castle_


	3. Chapter 3

_Once upon a time, there was a man who through misused magic found himself transformed into an ass by his lover. Only by eating roses could he hope to regain his human form. But even as an animal, he retained the mind and emotions of a man, and so, furious with his lover he spurned her offer to fetch him the flowers that would cure him._

_Yet ignorant of his dilemma, the townsfolk took him to be a common ass and would not suffer such a base animal to gorge on roses and instead, he did eat hay as other asses did. _

_At last by a goddess's hands, he devoured garland after garland of damask and crimson roses, regained his humanity, and forgot his human lover entirely. (1)_

* * *

Until now, Fakir had only been working to end Drosselmeyer's story and had not penned one of his own. He'd never felt the need or desire to do so and called himself a fool for it. For now, when his need was so great he had not the slightest idea of where to being. He was not used to turning to others for help, he had stood between Mythos and the world on his own for so long, he had forgotten that he even could until Duck had forced her way in. Perhaps that was why it took him so long to remember Autor.

Fakir's headache had abated somewhat, but his mood was still foul and it only worsened when he failed to locate the bookish boy in his usual haunts in the library. At last thinking of that meticulously recreated shrine to Drosselmeyer, Fakir headed for Autor's home. Although mended, the door still bore marks of having been battered by desperate axe strokes. He knocked and that battered door opened to Autor's startled face. Everyone else had forgotten—would he have as well?

As Fakir entered, he saw that the room itself was so carefully restored, no signs of past violence lingered at all and though it was full noon outside, the preternatural gloom of the windowless room persisted. The candles that had been lit for that purpose did little to alleviate the darkness that the closely huddled bookshelves guarded so jealously. Looking at the careful restoration of the replica of Drosselmeyer's study, Fakir knew Autor could not possibly have forgotten anything.

And so, standing before Autor in his domain, Fakir began hesitatingly to lay out just why he had come. Autor's expression turned from startled to incredulous.

"It's just a duck. How should I know what's wrong with it?"

"Her." Fakir corrected tightly, not holding his anger in check very well and not wanting to. "Weren't you listening? She's Duck, she's Princess Tutu. The story's stopped but she's starting to disappear—she can't understand words anymore, she's forgotten how to dance."

But Autor merely continued to stare at Fakir as if he were absolutely out of his mind. "Of course she's forgetting! She's a _duck_. How many ducks do you know that are smart enough to understand human speech?"

"Don't call her stupid!" and Fakir was shouting suddenly, not certain when or why he had begun, his hands fisting in the other boy's shirt and all over a slur against Duck that had crossed his own lips dozens of times before.

Autor gave him a withering look, doing his best to ignore the threat in Fakir's eyes. "You're rather missing the point. Which is that she's returning to exactly as she was before the story pulled her in."

Fakir let go of Autor. "I already realized as much," Fakir responded, his tone resigned, fingers curling into powerless fists at his side.

"Then what exactly are you wasting my time _for_?" The other boy demanded throwing his hands up in the air in utter exasperation.

"I want to write a story."

* * *

A piece of bread in hand, Fakir sat on the bank of pond as Duck pecked enthusiastically at the freshly baked loaf he had bought on his way there. She was far too human in his eyes for him to offer her stale bread or let her eat off the ground if he could help it. He leaned back against a tree, his eyes drifting shut, the feel of Duck pecking at the bread in his hand, her bill occasionally brushing against his palm, and the slightly cool breeze the only sensations keeping him awake.

There had been such disappointment in Charon's eyes when he had faced the man after failing to come home that night. Somehow, he could not bring himself to care….

The sudden cessation of Duck's pecking drew him from such gloomy thoughts. He opened his eyes to find himself reflected in her blue ones as she gazed up at him in consternation—for there was no doubt in him that duck though she was, that that was the expression on her face—the tasty bread entirely forgotten. His mouth tugged upward in spite of himself into the faint approximation of a smile. For what could this expression of concern from her mean but that she had not lost all that made her Duck? She may have lost her memories and her humanity, but she was still Duck to the core. It was reassuring.

"Idiot. Just eat."

Of course she did not respond with the irate quacking that would have resulted had he made such a statement soon after her transformation back into a duck. There was no doubt about this either; she had entirely lost her ability to understand human speech, the experiences and abilities of the girl Duck fading away with each passing day, each passing moment.

But he found himself unable to fall into the same despair he had on that day he had finally realized what was happening to Duck. It was all because of that dream. It had given him an irrational hope. He mused that in that way, the dream had been much like Duck herself. Most of it had been nonsensical rubbish, but the only coherent words from the dream haunted him: _And so he decided to give his humanity to her._ He could not put it in words in his own thoughts, let alone on paper. The idea escaped him like wisps of smoke, but some vague part of him knew now that somehow, somewhere, there was a way out.

Reassured by the slight lightening of his mood, Duck resumed eating although much more slowly and pensively as she considered him. Her knight. Once the cloudy memory—too cloudy to even be really called a memory more of a feeling, really—that he was a knight had drifted into her thoughts, she could not think of him in any other way. He had such a hollow look in his eyes lately.

Had he always been this empty-eyed? So despairing? She wasn't certain: the answer to her questions seemed to keep slipping beyond her reach, lost in a fog of memories she could not penetrate. Somehow she felt he should be more…fiery, prickly? sarcastic or mean or even bitter, but not so entirely devoid of all hope.

Things appeared to be getting better though; he did not look quite as anguished lately. Yet in spite of this seeming improvement, she could not shake the foreboding feeling that seemed to have come to roost in her breast.

Duck finished eating, and with one last backward glance at him, waddled towards the reeds at the edge of the pond and entered the water. For all that Duck the girl had had the grace of a cow in a china shop, Duck the bird was inexpressibly agile. She glided over the surface of the pond with all the elegance of a ballerina performing a _glissade_._(2) _If he didn't know otherwise, he would never imagine that her feet were working tirelessly to create the illusion of ease and grace as she moved on the water. He watched her swim about lazily, his thoughts adrift.

And as Fakir watched her sketch arabesques in the water, he wondered idly if he could shatter his own heart, since that had worked for Mythos. She needed a human heart, Autor had said. Wouldn't his do as well as Mythos' had? What did it matter that the removal of hearts was a forbidden power?

Foolish didn't even begin to describe the idea. But sometimes attempting the purely foolish was the only hope. It had been purely foolish for Princess Tutu to give back the Prince his heart knowing she would lose herself and his love and it had been purely foolish of Fakir to challenge not only the Monster Raven but Drosselmeyer with a pen rather than a sword. And yet it had worked.

The words from his dream, the idea of giving his humanity to her, persisted. He couldn't dismiss them from his mind even if he wanted to, his thoughts always circling back to that same place, that same foolish hope. Purely foolish. Perhaps he could stem the inexorable ebb of Duck's memories after all. Perhaps he could turn her back into a girl after all. His gaze still followed the little yellow duck idling about in the water.

Just then, as if she could sense the direction of his thoughts, Duck's eyes met his once more. The feeling of foreboding spread wide its wings within her heart.

* * *

That evening, the lonely light from Fakir's table lamp reflected in the windowpane, emphasizing rather than banishing the darkness that seemed to surround him. He sat awake late into the night as he fully considered the implications of what he was about to do.

Through his own writing, he had come to realize that words couldn't be spun into the fine stuff of tales without a price. He had found this idea expressed with startling precision in a book he had first taken up in the hope that it might teach him something of writing and thus something of spinning tales into reality:

_"The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing...is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract... A poet says, 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.' This is what we know."(3)_

Simply put, you can't get something for nothing, a price must always be paid, a balance observed. And that was why spinning tales was such a dangerous thing to do, why Fakir's own childish attempt to defeat the Monster Raven had resulted in the death of his parents. A simple, happy tale could never be spun into reality as smoothly and easily as all that. Sacrifices and pain and suffering were needed to offset any possible happy ending. So, ravens had descended like a terrible plague of locusts, their beaks cutting like scissors into his flesh as his own screams and his parents' filled his ears. They had extracted forcibly the pound of flesh he had failed to pay in exchange for the glory of the happy ending in his childish scribbles. In the end, the price had been paid, so much lost and nothing gained.

Of course, this particular aspect of spinning tales hadn't held Drosselmeyer senile old fool had been so infatuated with tragedy that he had enjoyed tendering the price even more than anything he could have hoped to gain by paying it. He had had no problem making sacrifices from the lives of others to propel his stories forward. So what sacrifice, what price could return Duck entirely to herself?

Absentmindedly, Fakir tapped the nib of his duck feather quill against the table, engrossed entirely in this train of thought. Just how should he word things? Granted that Drosselmeyer's power had facilitated the transformation, but what had really made Duck human was Princess Tutu's pendant. And that pendant had been nothing more and nothing less than the prince's heart itself, the prince's own desire for humanity. Autor's words echoed in his mind.

Was that it then? The same answer that had plagued his thoughts with a vague unease ever since the night he had that dream. Would it be as simple as giving up his humanity, so she could have hers once more? But even as he put that deceptively simple idea into words for the first time, even if only in his own thoughts, all the old doubts returned. Who was he to toy with her life? How was he to know if she was happier as a duck or not?

He remembered her concerned blue gaze from the afternoon. In every way and in every story Princess Tutu had lost all, happily given it away for the sake of everyone but herself. Wasn't it time somebody made a sacrifice for her? There was nothing to make him hesitate, no loose ends to make him pause. Autor would know where to find the manuscript and he would cherish it, guard it as no one else would, if for no other reason than that it had belonged to Drosselmeyer once. Truly, there was nothing in this life as it was now he would regret giving up for her.

And so, he pulled out a blank sheet of paper, meticulously dipped the nib into a fresh pot of ink, and raised the quill to pen a story. A story about a knight who sacrificed himself, split himself in two, separating his humanity from himself, and placing it into a stone the shape of his sorrow, the color of his heart, all for the sake of a princess that he alone in the world remembered. A princess he had sworn to stay beside for the rest of his life. He would grant her heart's desire, whatever she wished to do with his humanity, it was hers to choose.

And so, the Knight Cloven in Twain gave his pendant heart to her, the Princess the World Forgot. _(4)_

* * *

_(1) Based on the story of Lucius in The Golden Ass by Apuleius_

_(2) glissade: a gliding step starting from fifth position, opening into second position, and closing in fifth. It may be held to the floor or used as a low leap._

_(3) From A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard._

_(4) "pendant heart" is based on some of my favorite lines from Milton's Paradise Lost:_

_And fast by hanging in a golden Chain_

_This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr_

_Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon. (II.1051-3)_

_These lines are also the basis of the title. I couldn't choose between "pendent" and "pendant" since I wanted both meanings, but then settled for "pendent" since "pendant" doesn't automatically evoke "pendent," but "pendent" does evoke "pendant."_


	4. Chapter 4

_Once upon a time there was a prince who loved a princess who was cursed to be a swan. But he betrayed her and declared his love for another woman. There are so many endings for them…_

…_his love for the cursed princess overcame the betrayal and the two lived happily ever after._

…_he realized the depth of his betrayal and so embracing his cursed princess one last time, the two hopeless lovers drowned themselves in her lake, together in death as they could not be in life._

…_he realized his betrayal too late. Now destined to be a swan forever, the cursed princess flew away. The prince was left with his grief. (1)_

* * *

A sea of nothingness. Everything blissfully empty. Fakir sighed in relief, he had been so weary for so long now, carrying all the burden of doubt, of a heavy past, on his own. Why should he be laden with memories that all the rest had left behind, memories of a vivacious red-haired girl who left smiles in her wake?

The dream of transforming himself in order to transform her had given him hope, but it was hard to grasp hope on one's own. It had all just been despair in disguise. He clutched the despair as if he could not bear to part with it. He would give everything away and hold fast to his despair. It was easier than trying to grasp an impossible hope on his own. Duck would be happy in any case. And he could finally rest. Yes, there was no other way but this…

He let all concern, all hope, all desire slip through his fingers with a grateful sigh. He did not even feel a flicker of concern when malicious, inhuman red eyes peered down at him and cackled in triumph.

* * *

Duck grabbed whatever it was that was making the horrible noises and threw it. She heard the clink of metal hitting a wall, and the disgruntled twang of abused gears. Her eyes flew open. She'd just broken another alarm clock, hadn't she? and how was she going to afford a new—a sudden realization interrupted her interior monologue.

"Ahhhhhhh! I'm going to be late!" Her cry, as well as the painful thump her body made falling out of the bunk bed and onto the unforgiving floor could be heard well into the hallway. Pique and Lillie must have been standing outside her closed door, shaking their heads in disbelief that her usual antics continued as regularly as clockwork of the not-abused variety, because the next thing she heard was Pique's voice calling out, "We're going on ahead, then, Duck."

"I'm sure you won't be late for the auditions for Sleeping Beauty today! There's no _way_ you'd be late and miss trying out for a role that would be hopelessly impossible for you and then falling into depression! Good luck, Duck! We'll see you later!" called out Lillie in a cheerful and breathless greeting.

Oh no! Duck had _completely _forgotten about the auditions this morning! Of course she was still in the apprentice class so there was no hope of her ever being cast as Princess Aurora or even one of the fairies, but she desperately wished she could be one of the Princess's attendants. She wanted to be a part, even a tiny inconsequential part, of such a beautiful ballet, especially after seeing the breathtaking performance of…hmm, that was funny, she could have sworn that her class had gone to see a famous ballerina perform Sleeping Beauty. And something terrible had happened. But when she tried to focus on the memory, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't remember any of the details.

She had a sudden flash of a dark-haired boy who insulted her as they struggled to perform a _pas de deux_. No, she had struggled; he had been graceful. But that was all. Weird. Really weird. She had no idea who he was. Oh, but she didn't have time for this! Dashing through her morning routine, Duck sped out the door and the girls' dorm running for the ballet building at full speed.

As Duck ran, something thumped rhythmically against her breastbone. She fished out a pendant from under her blouse. Okay, even weirder. Had she always had this pendant? Ah, she didn't have time to think about things like this! The auditions were this morning and. She. Was. LATE!

* * *

Of course she didn't make it on time, and of course the instructor reamed her out for missing try outs, and of course she had to clean up the practice room floor for all the blunders she made during lessons. Duck loosed a gusty sigh as she mopped the already glittering wooden floor. Why did it feel like she'd mopped this floor a million times before? Well, no doubt she had, the way she kept messing up in class.

She sighed again and leaned the mop against the barre. As she looked about the room idly, her eye was caught by a glint of red in the mirrors that lined the room. It was that pendant she had noticed this morning. She picked the stone up and looked at it again. For some reason she couldn't quite understand herself, Duck was sure that the stone should be brighter: the bright scarlet of fresh blood, not old, and…more translucent, glowing almost with an inner light, a smooth, perfect oval suspended from a pure gold chain. But it was not.

Instead, the pendant consisted of a large, dark crimson teardrop that looked more like a drop of clotted blood than anything else, hanging from a tarnished silver chain. It was perfectly opaque except when the light hit it just so, and then it reflected a warm rich red so beautiful it seemed to call out to her heart. She stared at it curiously for several moments.

As her fingers closed around the stone, Duck could have sworn that the thing pulsed like a heart in her hand. A little unnerved, she dropped the pendant and it slipped under the neck of her blouse, nestled in the hollow of her collarbone, as if it was meant to be there.

Her cleaning duty entirely forgotten, Duck pulled out the stone again, mesmerized by it. It was important, Duck _knew_ it was important, but she couldn't figure out why. She clutched her head in frustration, "Gah! What's wrong with me today!" she wailed.

* * *

It was like that the next day and the next and the next. The oddest things, like the pendant around her neck that she unaccountably felt she should never take off, a rosy lamp in her bedroom, a blacksmith's shop, would leave her heart aching and her feeling that she should remember something, something important. But no matter how hard she searched her memory, nothing came to mind. Had she always been this absentminded?

When she'd brought this concern up with Pique and Lillie, they had looked at her oddly. At last, Pique had responded, "Well, I guess you've always been a little scatter-brained. But what's wrong with that? You're happy and you do well enough in school," she concluded with a careless shrug. "Enough to scrape by," she amended after a moment.

Lillie had been much more effusive. She'd grabbed Duck's shoulders and shaken them so hard that Duck was certain her brain was still rattling about in her skull from it, all the while exclaiming, "Oh, poor Duck! You feel so upset about the Sleeping Beauty auditions that you've realized what a failure you are and fallen into a terrible depression so you can escape from your problems by pretending to have amnesia, haven't you? It's so terrible, but don't worry, you'll always have our support!" It had taken quite some time to free herself from that chokehold.

In the end, she decided not to ask her friends about the dark-haired dancer she remembered like the fragment of a dream.

* * *

Another frustrating day trying to figure out what exactly it was she couldn't remember and another evening spent cleaning the practice room floor because she had been too distracted in class to concentrate. Finished at last, Duck put away her mop and bucket and absentmindedly started heading for her room in the girls' dormitory.

Before she realized it, her feet were taking her out of the Academy campus, past the town square and she found herself beside a duck pond. For some reason she couldn't explain, it always made her feel calmer, being here. She had a sudden vision of a black-haired boy sitting on the pier as she looked back at him from the middle of the pond. And just as swiftly as it had come, the flash of memory was gone and she was sure she had again lost something important, something she treasured.

Duck wandered about the woods near the pond, lost in thought and, after much fruitless meandering both mental and literal, soon found herself to be lost in fact as well. She had no idea where the center of town was, she was so turned around. The trees were close together and so high, she couldn't see the walls of the town rising up around her or the church tower in the distance to give her any sense of direction. To make it all worse, she couldn't remember what you were supposed to do if you got lost. Were you supposed to stay put? Wander around? Well, since it was wandering around that her got her lost in the first place, maybe more wandering around would help her find her way out, she concluded in her typical fashion. Her decision made, Duck resolutely stepped forward in no particular direction.

At last the trees started to thin a bit and she found herself in a clearing. It wasn't a pleasant woodland glade, but almost barren instead. The ground was rough and uneven as if the roots of a massive tree that was no longer there still insisted on their presence. Duck stepped out from the trees.

As she walked about in the clearing, looking around curiously, she entirely missed the low rock right in front of her, and tripped. Instead of falling a few feet to the ground, Duck felt as if she were falling through infinite light.

"Ah child," a voice sighed, like wind whispering through endless tree leaves. "I had hoped you would come."

"Who are you?" asked Duck as she felt herself falling further, further.

She could feel the voice smile somehow. "I used to collect memories," it answered, "building them ring by ring around myself, from all who came to me to try their power to spin tales. I am the Timeless Oak Tree."

At that, Duck frowned slightly even as her slow, unending fall continued. "Why were you waiting for me to come? Do I know you?"

"In a way," the rustling leaves answered back. "You knew my daughter. And her daughter."

Now Duck was really at a loss. As far she knew, there were no talking trees in her acquaintance let alone a family of them! Maybe Lillie was right about the whole going crazy thing...

Something of her helpless confusion must have conveyed itself to the tree because the next thing she heard was the creak and snap of branches swaying and cracking in a gale, the crackling of a massive oak holding lightning in its crown, and then, "Remember."

And instead of an infinity of light, Duck was falling through an infinity of memories. A yellow duck swimming in a pond watching a heartless prince dance. A monstrous raven that pecked at the prince's heart. An old man offering her a sparkling red pendant. A dark, tortured princess. A puppet wishing for a heart—"my daughter," the Tree whispered. Countless others. But the face that she kept returning to over and over again was that of a glowering dark-skinned dark-haired boy with green eyes that were at times sharp as a blade and at others as gentle as leaves.

Duck remembered then, his dance with her in the Lake of Despair, their battle against the Monster Raven, his promise to stay by her side, the forced contentment in his eyes after she had turned back into a duck, his despair when she began to forget him. All the fog in her mind vanished as if before sunlight.

She had found it, the answer to all she could not remember, the precious thing she had felt she'd lost.

_Fakir_, she thought. _Fakir._

* * *

_(1) Based on various endings that have been performed for Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake._


	5. Chapter 5

_Once upon a time, there were two children, a boy and a girl, who loved each other: like white and red roses they bloomed side by side. But a frost came early, and a shard of ice entered the boy's heart. He left behind such childish things as love and roses. _

_The girl tried, again and again to find him, until she lost all her beauty to hardship and he scorned her. But one day, because she would not give up, the ice encasing him did melt, and he finally saw her as she was: the most beautiful rose in the world. (1)_

* * *

_  
Fakir_, Duck thought. _Fakir._

"Where can I find him?" she asked the Tree desperately. "What happened to him?"

"He is fading from this world," the Tree responded with endless calm, as if Duck's world wasn't falling apart after it had finally been put together again at long last. As if Duck wasn't losing someone who mattered so much to her, that she couldn't imagine her world without him.

Untouched by Duck's worries, the voice sighed, "When a true Spinner of Tales awakens his power through me, he roots a memory of himself within mine, a live and growing thing that only hardens into dead wood with his death. The leaves are withering in my memory of him, the sapling wilting."

Duck felt her heart plummet even as she continued falling through the consciousness of the Oak Tree. The Oak Tree just couldn't mean what Duck was beginning to be afraid the Tree _did_ mean. Every time Duck thought that a happy ending was at hand, why _why_ did it turn out she was so terribly mistaken? Like when she returned the Mythos' heart to him and thought all was well only to discover it had been soaked in Raven's blood.

And now, once more, what she had taken as a blessing was fast becoming a curse. Fakir had managed to turn her human once more, helped her regain memories that, although bittersweet, were more precious to her than air, and a hope that she hadn't even begin to realize existed had begun to bloom. That maybe, Fakir would be beside her truly, just as he had promised. That this time, there would be no faded memories or inexpressible thoughts between them. But although she was human now, Fakir was….

At last, she managed to ask in a strangled voice, "You….you mean he—he's dying?"

"In a manner of speaking," was the Tree's enigmatic reply.

Duck told herself that this must be a terrible nightmare. She would wake up and find that she was perched in the little basket on Fakir's desk and that he had fallen asleep in his chair again with ink stains all over his fingers. And none of this would have happened at all. But she could not leave Fakir's fate to wishful thinking. And so, she asked frantically, "Where is he? How can I find him?"

"You will find him," was all the Tree said as the infinity of light grew so bright that it seemed to consume Duck entirely. "Just as he found all that you truly are," the rustling leaves whispered.

* * *

The red eyes narrowed in spiteful glee and the voice laughed and laughed, like the raucous cawing of ravens. Fakir could not bring himself to care.

* * *

Duck found herself back in the clearing in the forest. She grasped the rock she had tripped over desperately, hoping to meet the Tree again, hoping for some clearer answers. But nothing happened, no matter how hard she clutched the senseless stone.

There was only one thing to do, then. She had to find Fakir, and she had to find him _now_.

She did not know how long she ran through the forest; such things didn't seem to matter anymore. Somehow, she was on paved streets again, looking right and left, longing to see him walking towards her from every side-street and shadowy corner. She didn't realize she'd bumped into anyone until they were all tumbling to the ground.

The three girls wearing Goldcrown Academy uniforms sat on the hard cobblestone street rubbing their sore rears and looking at each other in surprise.

"Duck, where have you been? You'll be late for rehearsals! And the teacher even said if you could show just marginal improvement in your pointe work, he'd give you a part," Pique said in her usual no-nonsense fashion.

Before Lillie could grab onto her and start shaking all the thoughts out of her head, Duck blurted out, "Have you seen Fakir?"

The question garnered her such puzzled looks that Duck thought she could almost see the question marks above their heads. "Fakir?" Pique repeated at last. "Oh, you mean like those snake charmers?" Still looking at Duck as if she had feathers growing out of her head, Pique added, "Um, no, I don't think there are any fakirs around." _(2)_

Some fates, however, cannot be avoided. Lillie latched onto her shoulders and asked in her sweetly concerned voice, "You've fallen in love with some gypsy, haven't you? Of course it won't be a hopelessly tragic romance where he gets hunted down by angry villagers and killed! Or, maybe you're trying to get a good luck charm so you can get the part of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, oh how dreadfully hopeless!" With one last jarring rattle, Lillie concluded her expressions of sympathy.

Both girls continued sitting on the ground as Duck shook off Lillie's hands and dashed off, with a hasty "Sorry, I'm in a hurry."

Lillie turned to Pique and remarked as if she were talking about the weather, "She's so cute and hopeless, isn't she?"

As she ran, Duck could hear Lillie's parting "Don't worry! We'll be there to cheer on your failure!" on her heels.

* * *

Duck didn't have time to try to figure out just what that conversation with Pique and Lillie meant. Or to be more honest, with their words, a terrible suspicion had started growing in her mind, but she couldn't bring herself to look at it too closely. No, she would just go straight to Fakir's house and find out exactly what was going on.

The door was locked, and no matter how hard she knocked no one answered it. She turned hastily towards Charon's smithy.

As she approached the storefront, through the display window, she could see Charon working on fixing some sort of sword sheath. His gaze was bent on his work as his rough fingers handled the stiff leather, and he did not see her watching him. He looked vaguely perplexed as he worked.

A little bell chimed as she entered, and he turned up to look at her. She didn't even wait for the door to close behind her before she blurted out, "Is Fakir here? I can't find him anywhere!"

Charon set the scabbard down, his brows knit in confusion. "Who?"

"I—I'm a friend of his from school."

"No, I mean, who are you looking for."

"Fakir." When Charon's confusion didn't clear, she added, "You know, your son."

"There must be some mistake. I've never even been married. I don't have a son."

"But you—he—didn't you adopt him when he was a little boy?" But the puzzled expression on Charon's face persisted and she felt the chill of fear run through her. "You know, Fakir," she repeated, near tears. "He—he's this tall," she gestured vaguely with her hand, trying to remember just how high Fakir towered above her, "with black hair and green eyes and—and a frowny face but he's actually really kind..."

But to her questions, all Charon answered in a pained and regretful voice, as if the absence of something he could not even remember hurt, was that he'd never had a son, adopted or otherwise.

Duck stared at Charon's careworn face set in lines of confusion and regret as her world crumbled around her. Fakir had disappeared entirely and she was the only person left in all the world who even remembered that he had ever existed.

* * *

Fakir stared back up into those inhuman red eyes with indifference.

He knew the only way to bring Duck back was to give her his humanity. And once he had started surrendering that small part of himself, it was so easy to give away everything—his heart, his memories, his desires, his life, and all its burdens.

In the end, he had given in to despair, forgetting that his aim had been to grant Duck's wishes, not to lose himself. It worried him sometimes, but the memory of that worry too was being blissfully erased. Sometimes, though, a doubt would awaken.

But then the malicious red eyes would glow with hatred and the laughter would continue raucously on and he would forget all concern and gratefully give in to apathy once more. Surely, her wishes were granted even as he had lost himself. Surely, she was human and happy, and he could at last rest.

The echo of what used to be his heart sneered, _You forgot the Monstrous Raven within you, Fakir: Despair_.

* * *

Duck wandered through the town in a daze. She stared at the gray stone buildings of Goldcrown Town as if she couldn't understand why they were there. And every place that reminded her of Fakir sent a stab of guilt and sorrow through her heart. He had disappeared for her sake, she was sure. Why else would she be human once more? But being a girl again was meaningless if he wasn't there with her.

This was the bench she'd fallen asleep on when they were searching for Mythos. And this was the church that had the secret passageway into Drosselmeyer's lair, where she had danced against Princess Kraehe for Mythos' heart and won; or at least, thought she had, until she learned that the heart she had returned to him was tainted with raven's blood. And it was here that Fakir had fought against his destiny and almost died to help save Mythos. And it was in this square that Mythos and Princess Tutu had danced a _pas de deux_ even as Miss Edel burned herself to embers in order to save Fakir.

As Duck looked at the spot where Fakir had lain injured, she clutched the pendant around her neck as if it could somehow offer her comfort. And it pulsed.

She looked down at the strange stone which had taken the place of Princess Tutu's; the jewel was undergoing some sort of change. It was still a teardrop shaped stone strung on tarnished silver. But the gem was darkening, from dull red to almost black. Just at the very heart of the stone, however, a deep, deep crimson light had begun to gleam. As she stepped towards the hidden passageway, the spark of red flared, growing brighter.

Half-dreading it would do nothing, the chain still around her neck, Duck pressed the pendant for a moment into the stonework that guarded the entrance into Drosselmeyer's carefully prepared stage for Princesses Tutu and Kraehe. As if it had been waiting for this moment, waiting for her arrival, stone gave way to darkness. She entered the hidden passageway once more and the heart of the jewel in her hand shone even brighter.

There was no Fakir, this time, to help her through. But, as she wound her way deeper into the underground ruins—even more broken down than they had been last time—the pendant lit her path just enough for her to make it down treacherous stairs and around debris littered walkways that fell into nothingness on either side.

Soon, she reached the collapsed room that led to the underwater caverns she and Fakir had traveled through. This, Duck thought looking at the moss slick stone around her, was where he had learned that Princess Tutu who was Duck was just a duck. He was the only one, wasn't he, to ever really know who she was? He was the only one who knew the hopes and desires of a girl named Duck.

And even after he had found out that she was nothing more than a duck, he had promised her his life. Whether magical princess or girl or duck, she had always been Duck to him and no one else. Just then, the Oak Tree's parting words came back to her:

_You will find him. Just as he found all that you truly are._

Her heartbeat sped up at the thought. Yes, she was sure of it. He would be here.

Making sure the pendant was secure around her neck, she leapt into the water. On reaching the end of the underwater labyrinth at last, Duck took in great gulps of air as soon as she broke through the surface of the water. Near the end there, she had been beginning to worry that she wouldn't be able to make it.

All such thoughts scattered from her mind as she looked up into the large echoing chamber and saw the same island in the center of it. There, in a nest of briars, curving like wicked talons clutching at him and trying to tear him apart once more, she saw him, her knight.

Without a moment's hesitation, Duck ran into the water, swimming as the small lake deepened. She pulled her way onto that little island of rough white stone overgrown with briars, careless of her hands snagging on thorns and splinters. He lay on a bier of pale wood dressed in the dark blue doublet and black tights of a ballet knight, a shadowy cloak fanning out beneath him. He was so still, he might have been a statue, his open eyes gazing vacantly into nothing. The green of his piercing gaze had faded almost to gray.

Duck lifted one scratched hand to gently trace the side of his face. With tears in her voice, she said "Fakir, you jerk. You lied. You didn't stay beside me like you said you would."

But he didn't answer and her words echoed in the large chamber until they lost all meaning. She bent down closer to examine his face, hoping to see a flicker of expression, of recognition. For some reason, she was seized by an impulse to remove the pendant around her neck and gently press that dark red stone into his chest, where his heart should be, while kissing him just as she had seen Princes Kraehe do once as she had pulled out a heart shard from Mythos' chest.

The pendant already in her hand, her lips hovered just above his before she came to her senses. She felt as flustered and guilty as she had when Pique and Lillie had written a love-letter to Fakir for her and he had found it. Just what did she think she was _doing_? She flushed scarlet and scratched her head in embarrassment with her free hand while laughing sheepishly, even though there was no one there to witness anything. "Ahahahaha. What am I _thinking_?"

_Sleeping Beauty_, her mind supplied unhelpfully. Somehow, she didn't think Fakir would appreciate her mentally casting him in the role of Aurora. What was wrong with her? There wasn't time for any of this nonsense.

She turned back to the pendant, and almost let go of it in shock when it began beating, slow and steady, like a heart in her hand. Her fingers cupped it more carefully to prevent her clumsiness from taking over and dropping the thing. Duck puzzled over the mysterious stone in her hands. Just what was this pendant, anyway? She traced the shape of the teardrop gently with a forefinger, her eyes widening in awe and sadness as she realized just what she held in the palm of her hand.

His heart. Fakir had given her his heart to turn her human.

_Oh, Fakir_ she thought. Didn't he understand? For her, there was no point in wanting to be a girl if it meant he wouldn't be with her as he had promised. _What's the point of this,_ she asked him silently,_ if you're not here by my side?_

She gazed at his supine figure once more and then, handling that gem gently, oh so gently, began pressing it into his chest. She watched as the stone slowly began sinking into him, and as it sank further and further into his breast, she could feel the change overtaking her once more, of arms giving way to wings, girl giving way to duck. The pendant was almost in. Her transformation was almost complete. Half human, half duck, she smiled a little sadly and looked down at Fakir one last time. This might be her last chance to remember him as he was and everything they had gone through together. The urge to kiss him grew: it would be her last chance to ever do so. She shook away the strange thought.

Duck would be a duck once more and her memories, well, no doubt, they would fade all over again...But she would pay any price to have Fakir back. She would return to her true form once more. And so she held her fingers over the stone, returning the heart Fakir had given her so freely.

As if he had heard her thoughts, all of a sudden, Fakir's sharp green gaze snapped into focus. His hand shot up and clamped down on her own so quickly, she took a step back in surprise. He grasped the wrist of her feathery hand which was still gently pressing the pendant into his chest, his fingers tightening remorselessly. He gazed into her eyes, and then deliberately, so deliberately, he spread his fingers along her hand and twisted viciously. Duck cried out in pain.

The pendant broke in two.

* * *

_(1) Based on the Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen._

_(2) fakir: as adopted into English, a term indiscriminately applied to Muslim or Hindu ascetics who can supposedly perform feats of magic and endurance._


	6. Chapter 6

_Once upon a time, there was a king who loved his queen more than he loved his kingdom, and when she died, he emptied the royal treasury to build a mausoleum for her, shaped like a colossal white rose all made of marble. _

_But his people suffered and his sons vied for his throne, and soon his kingdom was bathed in blood because he had lost himself to love and grief. (1)_

* * *

The pendant broke in two.

"You little _fool_!" Fakir hissed with more venom in his voice than Duck had ever heard in his darkest moods.

Always, she knew, no matter how cutting his words, there was always a shadow of gentleness in his eyes that softened any harshness. She forgot sometimes the harshness of their beginning. She had known him to be kindhearted for so long that she did no remember there was a time he had not been so towards her. And so she did not realize that she _had_ heard that very tone in his voice before, and directed at her. He had been just this ruthless, this angry, this threatening when he had first told her as Princess Tutu to stay away from Mythos.

Duck recoiled back in pain and surprise, but her fingers were still caught in Fakirs' unforgiving grip and she could not retreat more than a step.

* * *

As soon as Fakir felt his heart returning to him, memories coursed through him instantly and painfully and he knew at once exactly what must be happening. Curse Duck and her foolishness! She would undo the gift he had worked so painstakingly to give her. So he did the only thing he could to stop her: twisted her fingers harshly and snapped the damned rock in two.

And so easily the pendant had broken in two, almost as if the stone itself had wanted to. Wasn't it fitting that the stone which embodied the heart and humanity of the knight who had been torn into two should itself shatter into two with such little resistance? Half of the heart settled within him, tearing into him like a dark shard of glass. Bitterness sank into him, but with it came determination and resolution and a ruthless self-control. He closed his eyes, trying to overcome the pain. After all, wasn't turning Duck human exactly what he had set out to do in the first place?

Duck's numb fingers tightened around the top half of the now broken teardrop. Its color intensified into a burning red so brilliant that it was almost too beautiful to look at, a red that almost burned gold in its brightness and beauty. She stared uncomprehendingly at the shard still in her hand, a look of horror coming over her face at last as the entirety of the situation sank in. "Oh no," she gasped. "What've I done?!"

She knew how terrible an incomplete heart could be. What would happen to Fakir? Would he become a shadow of himself now, the way Mythos had been without his heart intact? Was the damage irreversible? But no matter how many times she cried out his name, he did not open his eyes.

Still clutching the remaining heart shard, Duck grabbed Fakir by his midnight-blue velvet-clad shoulders and shook desperately, "Fakir! Fakir! Fakir, I broke your heart! I'm so sorry! Are you okay?" At any other time, the sheer absurdity of her words would have elicited a response from him. But he did not even seem to be aware of her presence anymore, he lay so still in the bed of thorns.

When it seemed that no reply was forthcoming, she hastily let go of one shoulder and tried to press what was left of the pendant back into his chest. But this woke him where everything else had failed. He slapped away her hand, a grimace marring his face, even as his eyes remained closed. At last, he opened them and looked up at her worried face.

_Odd_, he thought in a detached sort of way, _it should feel good to hear my name on her lips, to see recognition in her eyes again_. Yet when he searched for that feeling of joy within himself, all he found in its place was emptiness.

Even the relief that had begun flooding through Duck on seeing Fakir open his eyes was tinged with concern. For unaccountably, his eyes were more gray than green, a still, lifeless color like little chips of crystal that glinted without any hint of warmth.

Both of them seemed to be frozen in a tableau, him half-sitting up and one hand encircling her waist loosely while she knelt by his side holding onto his shoulder.

They stared at each other for a moment that seemed to stretch forever in that dark, timeless place, until at last, with a shrug and a look of irritation, he shook off her arms. Duck tried not to be hurt too much—after all, Fakir always behaved like this and usually it didn't bother her. He would always prickle like a burr hiding something too fragile to be seen, let alone touched, where emotions were concerned. But the blush and expression of embarrassment that would usually soften such a rejection were missing from his face this time.

At last she ventured, in a slightly hesitant voice, "Let me return the rest of your heart to you, Fakir."

The gentleness of her voice and the shadows of concern in her soft blue eyes made the jumble of emotions in his chest sit uneasily. His resolve to return her memories and her humanity, his anger and his pain at the trick hand fate had played against him, his icy self-discipline all shifted as if trying to find some unnamable, inescapable thing that seemed to be missing. He brushed aside the unease.

"Are you a complete idiot? What do you think was the point of all this," he continued, gesturing vaguely at the broken pendant still in Duck's hand, "if it wasn't to turn you human again?"

Of course there was nothing that set Duck's anger off more than Fakir's arrogance and smarter-than-thou attitude. What made it worse was that he seemed entirely in earnest this time: there wasn't the usual hint of teasing or consideration in his voice. She found herself repeating the pained thoughts she had had earlier as she wandered through this subterranean maze to find him, but this time in anger and exasperation, "I don't care about that!"

"Well, obviously I do," he snapped back. But even as he answered her, Fakir realized that the words weren't true. No, he didn't actually care, about anything really, except for making certain that his initial plans were carried out. As to the nature of those plans, they seemed a thing wholly unrelated and uninteresting to him. He was emotionally detached from the concept of having her become human once more even as he was mentally dedicated to the idea more than anything else. The_ wanting_, he realized, was absent. "I'll take out my heart again and—"

Now it was Duck's turn to be entirely scathing. She couldn't believe after all she had gone through to find him, all the terror the Tree's words had caused in her, that Fakir could even possibly consider such a thing. "Are you crazy?! The Tree said you were _dying_! Do you think I'm just going to stand here and let you do that to yourself again?!" She did not think she could bear to see him turn himself once more into that hollow, lifeless statue she had first seen.

"So, what then? Do you think I'll just take back the rest of my heart so you can go back to being a duck?" He did not know why he rejected the idea except it was the one thing he was certain he would not be able to bear, especially if he had the rest of his heart with him.

Duck opened her mouth to protest, just as the truth of his words struck her. Either she would lose her humanity and her memories and be absent or he would lose his consciousness and existence and be absent. That regardless, whichever course was adopted, Fakir's promise to stay by her side could never be kept.

"It's selfish of you," he continued ruthlessly, his eyes glittering coldly, demanding she bow to his will, "to give me back the rest of my heart so you can feel better about yourself. Always playing the martyr. Would you have me go back to the world so I can be _alone_?"

Duck felt herself entirely undone because he was so terribly, completely _right_. She hadn't been thinking of him at all, had she? Suddenly, all her recent memories of Fakir came to mind, how in recent weeks, months even, he had always seemed so sad and lonely and she had felt helpless in her inability to aid him. "But I _can't_ just let you give away your life, Fakir!" Duck choked out in an anguished voice. "Isn't there any other way?"

Duck found herself staring at the pendant once more, blinking back tears, as she heard him continue in a little less harshly, that since neither of them was willing to give in, there was no other choice but to continue with things the way they were.

"At least," he concluded in a callous, sarcastic tone, "now we can both be human."

He pried the broken pendant from her fingers and lifted the tarnished silver chain over her head. As the now red stone settled into place against her collarbone once more, Duck felt its remorseless jagged edges.

* * *

_(1) Based on the historical figures Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal; their love story is one of the most famous ones in India._


	7. Chapter 7

_Once upon a time, there was a woman who, thinking to save her people, betrayed them to invaders who swept through her land like an implacable wave bent on devouring everything. _La Malinche _her tribe spat at her, as they watched the courteous, ruthless enemy embrace her. Marina, he called her, his slave girl from the sea, his tongue and ears among the natives. She spoke for him, she spoke for them, her own voice lost in the ceaseless rushing of the tide. _

_Traitor, she read in the eyes of her tribe. Mine, she read in his eyes. There was nothing at all left for her. (1)_

* * *

Rue was just restless, or so she told Mythos.

But really, she felt herself trapped in a cage as completely as she ever had when she thought the Monster Raven her father. Then, she had been ensnared by his lies, her self-hatred, and so much despair that the cage itself seemed a mercy since it kept some of that despair at bay. Now the cage was much more beautiful—not just gilded, but pure gold bars as fine as spidersilk, but bars nonetheless, festooned with chains of precious gems, a perch lined with seed pearls, a cage nonetheless. She loved Mythos. But human girls cannot live entirely in fairytales even if they have found their fairytale princes.

She could not bring herself to consider which precisely made up the bars of her cage: love, Mythos, or the fairytale. She loved him. Was that not enough? He loved her. Was that not enough? But life was not fair, even in fairytales. Especially in fairytales.

Rue found that fairytale existence was a strange colorless thing. At first it had fascinated her, how all the colors around her glowed so brightly, so perfectly, as if nothing but light existed in the world. But with the passing of each day—were there days? Time seemed such an odd thing, never moving, always moving here—the novelty wore off. Fine gowns and balls and roses and swans and beauty without end. But there were no bonfire dances, no school uniforms, no ducks. And worse still, in his waking hours, Mythos was part of that colorless beauty.

Was she herself the only imperfect thing here, hers the only heart that hungered for more? Was the question itself a proof of her imperfection? And so she buried it and all her doubts far away where Mythos could not see them for fear he would leave her entirely. She could already feel him growing distant, out of her reach in his perfection; she could feel him, sometimes, waking in the night and drawing into himself, leaving a cold space between them as if he did not wish for her to follow.

Behind her the ball continued as it would have had she participated, had she been absent, had any other woman in this fairytale gown, all ivory-colored feathery lace, stood in her place. The prince drifted among his courtiers, returning to her side from time to time but never seeming to actually see her and she moved from the arms of one well dressed count to another's until freeing herself with some equally polite and meaningless excuse.

She could not bear to watch what they called dance any more and found herself gazing at her own reflection trapped in the floor-length windows of the ballroom. Behind her the dancers continued to move in their carefully crafted circles, not one sinew straining in their measured, desultory movements.

Each night, she dreamt of ballet. Of a _jete_ so impossible that it was like flight.

She had tasted so much of sorrow all at once she had thought that, now being free of the Raven, she'd embrace nothing but joy until the end of her days. How wrong she had been. Because even in this perfect fairytale world, she had discovered to her surprise, she herself was the same as always.

They showed only surfaces here, and true they were glittering, enchanting surfaces, but it made her feel even more out of place. She could be gracious and charming in her own right, but her haughtiness, her pride, were as much a part of her as her elegance. And there was that touch of the Raven in her still (or was it her humanity?) that could not feel secure in this happiness. It rang too hollow, shone too brightly to be real.

As if to compensate, every day the despairing tortured part of her that had been Princess Kraehe came a little closer to the surface no matter how hard she tried to bury it.

* * *

The Raven's influence haunted Fakir's dreams.

It started the day he saw a sparrow with a broken wing flutter helplessly on a low, stone wall. He watched the bird indifferently, with a detached expression of interest as if examining unfamiliar choreography while the sparrow struggled to fly despite the wing that bent so awkwardly. He could not say what drew his attention—it certainly wasn't concern for the bird's welfare. The sparrow's little fluttering dance as it tried to take off with one wing was somehow entrancing. Some part of him thought it beautiful.

So focused was he on the drab little bird and its futile attempts, he did not notice that Duck had snuck up behind him, ready to pounce on him cheerfully with a "Hi Fakir!" and hopefully draw out _some_ sort of response.

Ever since they had returned from the underground cavern where Duck had tried and failed to return his heart, Fakir had become more and more withdrawn. He was once more among the foremost danseurs at Goldcrown Academy, but she was so caught up in her anxiety over him that she was once more a hopeless failure. No one seemed to remember he had ever disappeared, which would have worried Duck had she not been so preoccupied with Fakir, since such collective amnesia could only mean that the townspeople were in the thrall of another story and once more their thoughts and memories were not their own to control.

Life seemed to continue as if nothing had happened. Although really, the world had changed, had flipped upside down and then inside out and backward until it was hardly recognizable to her, until Fakir was hardly recognizable to her. He kept his distance from her, even ignored her at times unless she forced her presence onto him in a loud, in-your-face way that even he could not overlook.

But as she crept up on him, she forgot her initial objective; he watched so intensely that she herself became interested, wanting to know what had caught his attention so completely. But his body blocked her view and just as she reached for him to ask him what he was looking at, he turned abruptly and brushed past her, an indifferent expression on his face.

"Fakir, wait!" Her shoulders slumped a little when he did not turn. But instead of following him as she had intended, some impulse made her turn back to find what he had gazed at so intently. And so she paused and saw the bird, little black eyes that were usually so bright dimming with resignation. It cheeped plaintively, no longer even attempting to move its good wing anymore.

"Oh, you poor dear," she whispered softly, looking down at the sparrow.

And Fakir had just walked away, as if the bird did not matter, as if its despairing cry for help did not matter. True, Mythos was the one who ran into burning buildings to save caged birds, but Fakir himself was not one to watch suffering idly, to watch it as sport and move on when it no longer entertained him. Duck felt a chill run down her spine.

She spoke gently to the little bird, convincing it she meant no harm until it agreed docilely to be lifted onto her wrinkled handkerchief. "Don't worry now. I'm just going to take you back to my room and I'll have you patched up in no time," she told the sparrow as she cradled its small body in her cupped hands. Thoughts of Fakir would have to wait, the little sparrow needed her more desperately.

Back in her dormitory, Duck did her best to splint up the wings with some light twigs, trying to keep up a soothing chatter to distract her patient, "It's going to be all right. The wing will heal straight and you'll be flying again as right as rain!" She felt more than saw the prickly jagged stone she wore flare with a warm and reassuring light as she cared for the bird. The light soothed her as much as it seemed to soothe the sparrow in her hands.

"Remember, help yourself to the food and water if you get hungry. You need to keep your strength up!" she added, setting down a plate of seed and a shallow dish of water on her desk. The sparrow cheeped at her sleepily in reply and Duck closed the door to her room on her way out as quietly as possible as she made her way out, not wanting to startle the already injured and nervous bird any further. Her thoughts returned to Fakir once more.

Duck felt uncertain of her memories at times, unable to quite trust them. After their slow fading and instantaneous return, she worried sometimes that perhaps she might still be missing something important or perhaps she was misremembering how things were. And yet, even despite these doubts, she was certain that once upon a time, Fakir would have been the one to take the sparrow home and care for it with a gentleness that would give the lie to his harsh words.

The Raven's influence haunted Fakir's dreams. Duck did not know this, but she felt it, not in anything as concrete as words or thoughts but in the ache in her heart, in the sorrow in her bones. Fakir was drowning, before her eyes, in darkness.

Each day, the jagged stone around her neck seemed to somehow become more and more beautiful.

* * *

Mythos felt a shadow in his heart. He would awaken at night with his heart pounding. And the nights themselves seemed impossibly, inexorably longer, as if the shadows in his heart were darkening the entire realm. He thought he felt the Raven, more than just in his memories, but surely that was impossible. And if anyone would know, it was him—the Raven was vanquished, his heart intact and beating, raven's blood mingled with his own. Surely he would know, he thought anxiously and did not see his princess drifting further and further away from him.

* * *

_(1) Based on the Aztecs, Cortes, and La Malinche, the woman who betrayed her people to save them and became the "Mother" of Mexico._


	8. Chapter 8

_Once upon a time, there was a king who withdrew into his palace and became a mystery to his subjects. One day, disaster struck, as it always seems to do, and his city burst into unquenchable flames, blooming like a large fiery rose with the royal palace untouched and beautiful at its heart. The king opened his palace to the homeless and despairing and worked to rebuild the city. But a terrible thought like a cankerworm ate its way through the hearts of his people and this is all they ever remembered of him hereafter: he sang and played his lyre while we burned. (1)_

* * *

"Princess of my heart," Mythos greeted her, as he did every morning, but the smile on his face was distracted, his amber eyes far away. "Perhaps it is time to return to Goldcrown Town." Rue, already seated at the elegant table at the center of the light-filled breakfast room, set down the crystal flute she had just brought to her lips, the scarlet juice in it trembling.

Her eyes sparkled suddenly, and a soft smile made her lips curve gently upward—he was truly her prince. He had seen the wish in her heart, he had seen the desire she had not dared voice lest he think her unhappy here in his kingdom, and had granted it. Her love had almost destroyed him, had twisted him beyond recognition and yet he had still saved her, still chosen to love her. She owed him every happiness, every joy.

But, preoccupied, Mythos did not see the joy in her smile and instead, continued as if he did not notice she had opened her mouth to speak. "My dreams are troubled," he said, not wanting to worry her —determined to protect her as he had failed to do before—by naming the Raven, "by darkness. I am concerned about the town."

He did not see the smile falter on her lips, the sparkle dim in her eyes. No, he did not see. And she could not tell him. Rue felt as if her own vicious taunts to Princess Tutu had come back to haunt her. She could not speak, for if she did, Rue feared, her love might vanish in a flash of light. And she would not risk that for anything, even her own happiness.

So lost was she in her own misery, she could not make sense of his words.

* * *

Duck was miserable because Fakir was, even though he seemed entirely unaware of and completely baffled by his own emotions. There was always a touch of stunned pain in his eyes, as if he himself could not believe that he should feel hurt, as if he could not figure out _why_ the feeling even existed at all. The emotion stayed trapped in the depths of his now almost gray eyes—eyes that crackled like ice with coldness—but Duck could always see it there.

Ever since the injured sparrow, she could not help noticing all the little cruelties in his behavior. Cruelty by omission really: where once Fakir would have helped, he watched with an almost amused indifference. She was certain it was because his heart was incomplete. What else could it possibly be? And yet when she had tried once more to bring up the matter of his broken heart, he had silenced her with the same scathing look, insisting she keep her half of the pendant and never raise the subject again. Since then, he had taken to actively avoiding all the places she knew he used to frequent. As if the sight of her, too, would pain him.

She had thought at first that it was just her he had been avoiding, but one day as she meandered aimlessly through the streets of Goldcrown Town she found herself in front of Charon's shop and learned otherwise. It was an unnerving feeling of having lived this exact moment before, for there Charon was, head bent over the hilt of an antique dagger he was trying to clean. He was focused entirely on the piece in his hands, and he did not see her watching him. He looked troubled as he worked.

A warm, red spark flared in the glass, startling Duck from her thoughts before she realized that it was only the broken heart-pendant she wore reflected in the glass of the window. Perhaps it was some trick of the sunlight, but in that moment, the stone seemed to glow an intense, distressed red as if pleading with her to enter.

Somehow, before she knew quite what she was doing, Duck had pushed open the door, the little shop bell was chiming and Charon was looking up at her as she asked, in her usual bumbling scattered way, about Fakir.

"Is Fakir here? I've looked for him everywhere but I can't find him!" Seeing Charon's puzzled expression, she felt a fear strike her heart, wondering if he still did not remember his son. Was Fakir's story still overwriting Charon's memory? She hoped fervently that he simply didn't remember her and that was the cause of his confusion, that it was nothing more sinister than that, as she explained in a hesitating voice, "I'm a friend of his from school."

"That boy," Charon sighed, and Duck breathed out heavily in her relief. But he continued, worry etched in his face, "He hasn't been around here in days."

Duck wondered if this too was the result of her prodding Fakir about the pendant. If he was even avoiding his house now in order to avoid her. She stared at Charon's careworn face set in lines of confusion and regret and determined she would set things right. She felt the pendant warm against her skin, the sharp, broken edges brushing against her skin gently, as if encouraging her.

And this was how things had ended with her scouring Goldcrown Fine Arts Academy until she found Fakir at last in one of the more obscure and shoddy practice rooms, performing tortured _tours en l'air_ _(2)_, his body twisting with all the emotional turmoil he seemed incapable of expressing or even understanding anymore_._

He had glared at her but she had grabbed his hand fiercely and tugged until really, he had no choice but to follow her or lose the fingers on that hand to her persistence.

She had huffed and puffed and pushed and jostled and somehow gotten them to Charon's shop. But the entire way there, Fakir's eyes had not thawed the slightest, despite her antics. They had not even burned with rage. No, it was still that same icy indifference. But Duck was not one to give up so easily.

The little shop bell rung again, although this time there was decidedly discordant note in its tinkle as Duck pushed open the door with one hand and dragged the resistant Fakir with the other.

Charon looked up at the sound, and marveled at this girl he did not know. So many different questions darted through his mind—just who was this strange redheaded girl who had wrought a miracle in a handful of hours? How did she know Fakir? How had she brought him here when Charon himself could hardly convince the boy to talk to him let alone come to the shop? Charon wondered, as he seemed to do constantly of late, just what had happened to his son. Somehow, in a matter of days, Fakir had turned into another person entirely, one who seemed carved from a block of ice.

Duck could see the mix of emotions flitting through Charon's eyes as he looked at Fakir: disappointment, relief, frustration, a slow anger, but most of all, she saw hope. She wondered at the silence in the room, thick and palpable with so many things unsaid. There were so many unspoken words and emotions between them, and yet both still stood silent. Finally, she realized that _she _was the reason for that silence—she had no place in such an intimate family scene. For all intents and purposes, she was an outsider. With a twinge of sadness she refused to let herself feel, Duck blurted, "Ahahaha, I'm so silly! How can you have a father-son moment with me here! I'll just let myself out!"

The bell jingled one more time as the door closed behind her and she stopped and leaned against its hard, wooden surface for a moment and wondered at this pain she felt. She had never before been jealous that Fakir had a family. And even now, she realized, the turmoil she felt wasn't so much jealousy as loneliness. A sadness that came with the realization that she could not take part in this aspect of Fakir's life. That it would always be something beyond her reach.

Determined to put such bleak thoughts behind her, Duck convinced herself to walk back to the girls' dormitory without looking back. More than once. Okay, twice.

* * *

"Fakir," Charon reproached his son in a voice filled with frustration and disappointment. "What's happened to you? You stay out at all hours. You never come home." But his own anger was hardly important right now, and so Charon curbed the rest of the scolding words on his tongue, and instead reached out a rough callused hand and rested it on Fakir's shoulder comfortingly. "Tell me what's worrying you so."

Idly, Fakir noted that the man seemed to have lost all knowledge of Fakir's brief disappearance from the world. Duck had mentioned in her perpetual chatter that his existence had been erased from the world as he lay heartless in the catacombs beneath Goldcrown Town, but now it seemed that had all changed. Having been forced past its natural conclusion by Duck's actions, was the story trying to adapt itself to their actions in some way? he wondered. The question did not feel all that pressing, however, and he dismissed it indifferently. The memory of his annihilation, it seemed, could be as easily erased, as easily overwritten as the memory of his existence. The realization awakened something that had been sleeping uneasily within Fakir.

He shrugged off the hand and stared at the man as if he did not know him, or care to. "What are my worries to you?"

Charon could not prevent the appalled, angered tone in his voice at that. "I'm your father!"

"And what would I want with a worthless old man who can do nothing but tell stories?"

At those words, Charon recoiled as if Fakir had struck him. The ice within Fakir burned even colder as the man's reaction reminded him of when Charon had struck _him_, for wanting his destiny, for wanting the power of the knight's sword. The talons of despair dug deeper into Fakir; having already seen that flinch on Charon's face, he thirsted for more. More misery, more pain, more despair.

As if those words had unlocked a cage within him, something terrible and clawing burst out from his chest. Fakir felt himself at the mercy of a thousand needle-sharp raven beaks once more. He felt himself being torn in two once more by the _thing_ that had emerged from his own heart. Fakir did not notice that he seemed to be clad as a ballet knight once more, in a doublet and tights so deeply blue as to be almost black and a cloak as dark as the space between stars. He did, however, notice the sword like night that had somehow found its way into his hands.

Charon stared in horror at the gray eyes that shone as distantly and coldly as stars on a winter night. "Darkest night," Charon murmured in despair. "Darkest Knight," Fakir heard, and nodded as if he had heard his own name.

And then, without hesitation, he plunged the sword into Charon's chest.

The sword struck a hairline fissure in something beautiful and delicate and it broke like an egg hatching. From within, a rapacious cawing raven clawed its way out. The malicious laughing bird flew out from Charon's heart.

The Darkest Knight looked on as the raven came to perch in Charon's eyes.

* * *

_(1) Based on popular mythology surrounding the Roman emperor Nero._

_(2) tours en l'air: literally "turn in the air". A jump, typically for a male, with a full rotation. The landing can be to both feet; on one leg with the other extended in attitude or arabesque; or down to one knee, as at the end of a variation. A single tour is a 360° rotation, a double is 720°. Vaslav Nijinsky was known to perform triple tours en l'air._


	9. Chapter 9

_Once upon a time, the daughter of Spring gathered flowers in the fair fields of Enna and herself became a fairer Flower gathered by gloomy Death, which cost her mother all that pain to seek her through the world. And yet, having tasted of death, sweet and bitter and dark red as pomegranate seeds, she found she could never return to the land of living things, entirely. (1)_

* * *

At first, Fakir did not seek them out. But having tasted their despair, he thirsted for more. It was so much sweeter than nursing the dregs of his own bitter misery. At first, it was a matter of chance and circumstance, as it was with Charon. A smile on a face, a thoughtless gesture of happiness, or concern, or warmth. And he would feel an inexplicable rage. _Why, why should these others feel anything at all, when their hearts, just like his, were fraught with fissures?_

So it had been with the girl dancing among the flowers. He had been leaving a forgotten practice room that Duck had yet to discover—for the one thing he could bear the least of all was the look in her eyes. He did not even know what the look meant; it was as if he had forgotten how to read the expressions of her face. Or perhaps, he had never known. No, surely, once the sparkle or dimming in her eyes, the furrow in her brow, the dimple in her cheek had meant something to him, otherwise why would they haunt him so?

So, like the coward he had always been, he slunk away from her and hid himself away in long abandoned parts of the Goldcrown Academy's Ballet Hall. The rooms were dusty, the wooden floor scarred, the drapery stained. But there were no blue eyes here to torment him and he felt not unpeaceful.

He lost himself in dance. The raging in his heart quieted as if finding itself expressed in the punishing _pirouette a la seconde_ he pushed his body through —he could feel his muscles screaming as he spun again and again on one leg, the other at an unrelentingly stable right angle—and so did not need to torture his heart_.(2) _For now.

But as he had walked out of the old building near dusk, he had found himself unexpectedly in a garden, and there had been a girl, dancing as if her birthright were nothing but joy. Long golden strands of her hair spun around her, herself a fairer flower than any in the garden.

Seeing her simple pleasure was like grasping a nettle tightly in his bare hand. How could she feel such happiness? He wanted to wish it out of existence, to annihilate it as if it had never existed in the first place.

She turned, her eyes lit upon him, and he held out a velvet-clad arm to her. Confused, she stumbled. He drew the nightblack sword girt at his side, and struck.

It was as if his cold icy eyes could penetrate to the bottom of her heart, see all the cracks in it which had once almost led her to sacrifice herself for Mythos' monstrous love. Like striking at the weak spot of a finely crafted jewel, her heart had shattered entirely. He heard a cawing, and then, the strain of his transformation being too great for his body, he collapsed.

He came to, with the moonrise. The blonde girl was gone, and he had to wonder if it had all a morbid fantasy. Somehow he managed to push himself off the ground.

As he staggered away, a hand reached out of shadow and grasped his shoulder. The faint light of the rising moon struck glass. The eyes behind the spectacles were as impersonal as glass.

"Autor," Fakir said, having nothing else to give the other boy but his name.

Stung by Fakir's indifference, Autor replied, "So you truly are Drosselmeyer's heir. In all ways. You've surpassed him, you know," Autor continued, wanting to goad a response from the other. "Creating so many monster ravens, where the old man had only the one."

Something, the echo of a feeling long gone, recoiled in Fakir's heart at the words. "And you'll be nothing more than a librarian till the end of your days," Fakir sneered and stalked away.

* * *

Duck could not seem to shake the uneasiness from her dreams that night. Vague and full of darkness. Suffocating.

As she tossed and turned in her narrow bed, hoping to find an as yet undiscovered comfortable position on the thin mattress, the chain around her neck twisted and she wondered for one terrible moment if she would die such an embarrassing death, choked by her own necklace. Even when the chain loosened enough that she no longer feared for her life, the stone seemed determined to irritate her that night. It was a hard, painful bump against her collarbone when she tried to sleep on her stomach, it caught in her hair as she tried to turn on her side, and the chain kept chafing her neck no matter what she did. All in all, it left her feeling so cranky that she _almost _considered taking the irritating thing off. She couldn't repress the exasperated thought that somehow she should have expected this sort of behavior from Fakir's heart.

If she didn't know better, she would think the broken pendant was trying desperately to get her attention.

* * *

Standing before the mirror in her lavish room in the girls' dormitory of Goldcrown Academy for Ballet, Rue adjusted the jacket one more time, straightening an invisible wrinkle in the ruffle at her throat as she prepared to face the world of Goldcrown Town for the first time since her abrupt departure with Mythos when Drosselmeyer's story had ended. This room, which had once felt luxurious, roomy and elegant, was a mere shadow of her chambers in the palace. It had its share of bad memories—here she had been haunted by the Raven, here she had learned she was Kraehe, here she had felt ravens tear her skin like thorns as she transformed into the dark prima donna.

And yet. Here she was just a schoolgirl once more. Not an impossible fairytale princess, although surely in the eyes of some of the girls here, she would be that nonetheless; in their eyes she would be the much gossiped about glamorous upperclassman Rue who had gone on a dance tour for the past year or so—time was hazy in their memories where she and Mythos was concerned—and had now come back covered in glory and fame. Here, she was merely _like_ a princess and would have to contend with a petty jealousy that would somehow make the genuine smiles more genuine. Here, there would be a place for the pride that was as much a part of her as her heart.

Here, there would be _dance_. Not the elegant insipid ballroom waltzes, but true, heartrending ballet. It was movement on a knife's edge made graceful, beauty and pain inseparable.

No one had seen the mother-of-pearl carriage drawn by swans fly over the town walls like a rosy precursor of dawn. No one had watched as she and Mythos had alighted onto the peak of the church spire, her satin gown giving way to the gray Goldcrown Academy uniform and Mythos' royal purple fading into a blue blazer. Nobody questioned them too closely. It had helped that they had chosen to come late in the night and there were not many townsfolk around. But even those who had noted their presence had not paid much attention. It seemed fairytale characters were vague in the townspeople's eyes; they did not, could not, look at them too closely, their gazes inadvertently sliding away and taking their reappearance for granted.

As they walked hand in hand through the town in the predawn light, she saw Mythos' troubled gaze searching down empty streets, attempting to penetrate shadows. When her fingers slipped from his in a moment of distraction, she at last turned to him. Surrounded by these homey buildings, sheltered in the half-light of dawn, something of the imperious Rue who ordered around the hapless, heartless Mythos returned. "Mythos, who are you looking for?"

Startled out of his preoccupation by her tone, he sighed and at last answered, "I fear, my princess, that the danger is too great and I must tell you all, although I had hoped to spare you. I fear that the Raven returns and it is my fate to fight him as many times as he does."

Rue felt fear chill her spine. "Surely, surely that's impossible."

"I feel a darkness," was all he replied.

"And so you have come looking."

"Yes." Seeing the fear in her eyes, his gaze softened. He took her hand and said, "Come, my princess. I will look. Will you wait for me at the Academy? Knowing you are safe will ease my mind."

Perhaps it was because of the sunlight just beginning to strike the bright red tiled roofs of Goldcrown Town, but somehow, Rue found it in herself to resist both her fear and his wish. She smiled and attempted to regain her elegance and poise. "This too, is like a _pas de deux_, my love. I will not let you dance and suffer alone."

He took both her hands in his. "Please, Rue. For me."

And then, she could have no more objections. For how could she deny her prince anything he should ask for? But she had been Princess Kraehe once. She knew how to push her heart past bearing, and so instead of agreeing with his desire thoughtlessly, she had asked, "Where will you look? How will you find him?" thinking to herself that if the need arose, she would follow him, despite his desires.

"We have a bond" Mythos had responded grimly. "The Raven and I. One of blood. If he is here, I will find him."

And that was how she had ended up here, fidgeting nervously before the mirror in her room in the girls' dormitory. She felt a dread at the thought of emerging from the room. Not even because of the Raven, but at the thought of attempting to resume her old life. Dread mixed with anticipation.

What would Duck say, at her reappearance in Goldcrown Town? Not that Duck could say anything now, she thought with a pang. It was only Duck, and Fakir she supposed, who would truly remember who she was. It was their thoughts she worried about. At least there was little chance of their seeing through to her unhappiness when the threat of the Raven loomed above them once more, and so if nothing else, she could salvage her pride.

* * *

_(1) Based on the myth of Persephone; adapted from Milton's retelling in Paradise Lost:_

_"Not that fair field_  
_Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs_  
_Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Dis_  
_Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain_  
_To seek her through the world" (IV.268-72)._

_(2) pirouette à la seconde: a technically challenging type of turn, where the dancer spins with the working leg in second position à la hauteur. This turn is usually performed by male dancers, and because of the technical skills required to perform it correctly, it is seen as the male counterpart of fouettés en tournant."_


	10. Chapter 10

_Once upon a time, there was a boy who, finding himself in possession of a pair of wings, wanted to race the sun in his fiery chariot. But the wax holding together his pinions melted and dripped like tears mourning his failure. The boy fell into the sea, a death so insignificant that the sun never even glanced his way. (1)_

* * *

To Duck's frustration, it seemed that Fakir had become adept at avoiding her. She knew something was terribly wrong—she had gone to see Charon the other day and the man had seemed a shadow of himself. Strangest of all, for the first time since she had known him, she had seen him in his shop with his hands completely still, resting on the table as if they were mere blocks of wood. His hands were made for making, for creating. It didn't seem right to see them so empty. It was almost as if the pendant had seemed to twinge in sorrow with her, slowly winking a dull red to see Charon like this. Charon had looked at her helplessly when she asked if he and Fakir had patched things up.

She had hoped that Charon would be able to help Fakir in some way, but if anything, Fakir seemed to be doing worse. That he couldn't even bear to look at her face merely pointed at what Duck already knew: this entire terrible situation was her fault. And on top of all the guilt, in his absence, a loneliness so hungry had begun to gnaw at her heart that it felt like no one in the world could ever ease it. Except Fakir.

"That jerk," Duck muttered to herself in an attempt to turn sorrow into half-hearted anger. She continued climbing down the stairs of the girls' dormitory at a startlingly early hour—but then, she had hardly been able to sleep at all last night for worry over Fakir let alone oversleep. "He promised he'd always be with me, but he might have vanished for all I know! And it's all my fault—" she grasped the fragmented pendant that hung on a tarnished silver chain around her neck. Peering intently at the shimmering, broken stone, Duck missed the next step.

She tumbled down the few remaining stairs, and disoriented as she tried to stand up, she thought she must have hit her head harder than usual for standing before her was—

"Duck!" Rue gasped and embraced the dazed girl standing uncertainly before her.

A thousand questions raced through Rue's mind, a myriad of horrible possibilities intermingled with joyful ones. And so she did the only thing possible in such a situation: she grasped Duck's wrist in an imperious hold and dragged the red-haired girl behind her with a curt "Come."

Opening the door to the room she had just left, Rue ushered the two of them inside. The room was gloomy, the drapes drawn, but Rue paid it no mind. She guided the other girl—girl! but _how_?—to the small table sporting a vase of crimson roses and gestured at one of the chairs. With a pang of an emotion she could not quite identify, she realized that this was the first time this room had had any occupant besides Rue and Princess Kraehe.

Before Duck could recover from her tumble and her shock and ask her own questions, with the queenliness that had always been a part of her, Rue commanded, "Tell me everything."

Of course, Duck had never been one to understand that she needed to bow to royalty, and that, Rue thought smiling, was what made her Duck. "Rue! You're here! I'm so happy to see you again! But why're you here? I didn't think we'd ever get to talk again and why is it so dark in here? What's the fairytale kingdom like? Do you like being a princess? Here, I'll open these curtains, it feels like a funeral or something..." and Duck chattered on, tripping a little on her way to the window, struggling with the curtains, her usual cheery, clumsy self.

Rue tilted her head to the side and looked more closely. Something was amiss here. There was an edge of sorrow to this cheer—being so familiar with that emotion and the skill needed to disguise it herself, she could not miss it in another.

"Hmmm, they seem to be stuck," Duck mumbled giving another persistent tug. Suddenly, the drapes tumbled down from the window and the curtain rod clattering loudly as it fell. Dust motes glinted in the pearly dawn light. Duck stood back chagrined. "Um, that wasn't supposed to happen."

Rue laughed, a pleasant merry laugh which surprised her. She had not known she had such laughter left in her.

At the sound, Duck turned back to apologize, but the words slipped her mind as she saw with some relief that the hollow look she had noted in the older girl's eyes had vanished for the moment.

"Now," Rue said, a smile still on her lips, as she gestured to the jumble of curtains, "that you've taken care of that, tell me everything."

* * *

Autor looked at the manuscript in his hands by the light of a single flickering candle flame. That arrogant fool's words burned within him and he felt a sudden urge to thrust the entire thing, without discrimination, into the flame, a giant paper moth compelled to its destruction by his hands. But he resisted, for there was nothing to be gained by such destruction beyond a satisfaction that would disperse as swiftly as the ashes themselves.

He flipped through the pages casually, yellowed sheets mixed in with newer ones, covered with two hands: an older elegant script and a younger crabbed one. The carefully reconstructed bookcases of Drosselmeyer's study huddled around him as if attempting to peer over his shoulders. It was a manuscript that wove decades' worth of stories, generations' worth of lives, beginning with the very first tale Drosselmeyer penned—the endings to his half-completed stories inserted on fresher paper—and ending with the very last story Fakir spun. The Knight Cloven in Twain, indeed!

At last, Autor found the page he was looking for—a fresher sheet pockmarked with burns, as if it had been left in front of an open fire and stray sparks had eaten away at the words at random. And yet a closer look revealed it was hardly at random. Words were burned out just so that sense was preserved, even while meaning was drastically altered. He looked over the page again, the reflection of the candle flame gleaming in his spectacles, obscuring the hunger gleaming in his eyes.

It was a work of art really. More of an art than mere writing to craft a story out of words already written. For Autor had read closely and carefully, spending hours on choosing words to burn out so that line by line, he wrote a new tale. So that word by word the present and past would burn away and rewrite themselves like a phoenix rising out of its own ashes.

When Fakir had first left the manuscript with Autor to safeguard it, before his brief, mysterious absence, some of the old resentment had surged up in Autor again and he had wondered if he would forever be the gatekeeper, standing at the threshold of knowledge but never able to enter. It was hard, after all, to relinquish the dreams of a lifetime so quickly. But he had pushed down the envy and jealousy just as he had to help Fakir achieve his destiny before. And so at first, Autor had guarded the manuscript faithfully, hiding it away in a hidden drawer in the desk he had lovingly recreated in the image of Drosselmeyer's very own. After all, if nothing else, he had the real manuscript in his hands. He had glimpsed the hand of the author and could not tear his gaze from it. The story that had moved the world, his fingers lingered on the ink and he was filled with so much longing that it was unbearable.

It had burned there like a secret, a temptation. He could always feel the manuscript's presence, as if it were a living breathing thing, taunting him and his inability. And the thought that had merely been a whisper in his mind on the first night grew louder: his birthright had been denied him, had been thrust into the unwilling hands of Fakir. In an attempt to silence those thoughts, he would take the manuscript out and read it over each night, yet with each reading, the old jealousy burned higher, a blaze that seemed to grow by feeding on itself.

His first attempt had been a furtive one. He half expected Fakir, flaming sword in hand, to descend on him as he eyed the ending of Charon's tale, a smoldering twig in hand. With the care of a librarian emending an old worm-eaten text, Autor had meticulously burned out a handful of words so that a tale ending in regret overcome by hope merely ended in despair.

Autor had not really expected anything to happen. But he half-hoped and half-dreaded something would. And so, like a specter of death, he had kept a vigil at the old man's store every day since he had tried his hand at re-spinning tales.

And at last, something _had _happened. Crouching in a darkened alleyway outside the blacksmith's shop, he had heard the clang of metal against stone, he had heard the raucous cawing of a raven and fled, a horrified elation filling him. But after all these years of failures, he could not bring himself to believe that he had spun a tale in his own way. So he had to try fate one more time, and each attempt made the desire stronger, an intoxication that would not leave him be.

He looked down at the page he held in his hands. It had been his second attempt. With the careful scorching of one "never" he had changed the outcome entirely:

"And so she [...] again lost joy in her flowers..."

And each time, the Darkest Knight materialized to fill the gaps in the tale Autor had so carefully crafted. Yet Fakir dared call him a mere librarian! He would make the other boy regret his words. In fact, he was already making him regret them, though unaware. No, Fakir was no longer a writer, but a mere figure in a tale. A new story was churning its gears in Goldcrown Town now, and this time it was Autor's. Maybe he couldn't create, but he would be the one to choose what would remain.

Turning to another, unblemished page, Autor thrust the tip of a thin twig into the candle flame.

* * *

_(1) Based on the Greek myth of Icarus._


	11. Chapter 11

_Once upon a time, there was a man who lost his lover to death and was haunted by the ghost of her memory. One night he heard a dark tapping at his chamber door. His madness and sorrow had come to perch above him: a raven, at once bird and devil, prophet and thing of evil, which vowed to remove its beak from his heart nevermore. (1)_

* * *

The Darkest Knight watched without feeling, sword in hand, as a fledgling raven cawed its way out of the girl's heart. His eyes shone like moonlit ice, cold, indifferent. He released the transformation, the dark velvet of his cloak seeming wrap his body night for a moment, until he reemerged in his school uniform. Weariness no longer overtook him when he transformed, the darkness was so close to his heart.

Fakir could sense them all around him, the cracked imperfect hearts, all through the town they jangled. It was only when he searched for them, these fractured hearts and released the darkness within that he could make himself forget the color of Duck's eyes, could escape her words. Why, why must he think of her when he didn't even _care_, couldn't even care? He could not bear to face her, had taken to slipping away if he so much as heard the whisper of her presence and searching out cracked hearts so he could bury his own cracked heart in the cold oblivion of the Darkest Knight.

He stepped out of the art studio and did not see the bespectacled boy hiding in the shadows and watching with an expression of mingled horror and elation.

* * *

Heedless of the bells chiming the hour, Rue and Duck talked well into midday. Once Rue's surprise at Duck's human form had worn away, she embraced her friend again, as if to prove to herself that the figure before her was real. Yes, the tale was somber, yes the threat of the Raven resurrected loomed over them, yes she might lose her prince one way or another, but that did not mean she did not have this small cause for joy.

Duck plopped down on the chair gracelessly in surprise and dismay when she heard the reason for Rue and Mythos' errand in Goldcrown Town. She fingered the jagged pendant around her neck, and tried to explain how and at what cost Fakir had wrought this miracle but could not quite bring herself to voice her worries about the dark-haired boy, even to Rue. The thought was too tangled for Duck to work out, but she knew she could not tell Rue about his cold eyes, the darkness that shadowed him. As if doing so would somehow be a betrayal of Fakir. In the end, she clutched the broken pendant through her blouse, but did not mention it.

Rue wished again, as she had ever since Mythos had stated his intention of searching for the Raven alone, that he had not jumped into the situation blindly, that he had not left her to wait for him helplessly. "Do you think that Drosselmeyer has a hand in this?" the older girl asked, at last venturing to give words to her fear.

Duck frowned in thought. "What do you mean?"

Rue gestured at Duck vaguely, "You're human again, the Raven might have returned, both the Prince and his Knight are acting secretively...Do all paths lead us back to the same wretched tragedy?"

Duck, with her usual intuition and tactlessness, voiced the thought Rue had not, "And you feel trapped."

"As if a part of me has been locked away forever," Rue clarified, her hands clenching in her lap.

Duck's brow furrowed in concentration as she considered the other girl's words. When she had turned into a duck, she too felt as if a part of her had been locked away forever. An important part of her—the girl who had laughed with her friends, who had dreamed of Mythos, who had always teased and been teased by Fakir—had been missing. Was that how Rue felt now?

Duck wasn't sure she fully understood, but what she could grasp was all that mattered: Rue was unhappy. Duck reached over and touched the other girl's tightly-clasped hands gently with her own. "Do you want to set it free?"

"I can't. I can't let Mythos see the pettiness in my heart."

"But he loves you!"

"It's a fragile, uncertain thing. Love." Rue couldn't bring herself to admit outright to Duck that she feared she could lose Mythos' love at any moment, in part because she couldn't understand it. The Raven had convinced her all her life that she was imperfect, ugly, unable to be loved, and though she knew it was all a lie, perhaps a part of her still believed him. How could she ever confess such fears, such shortcomings to Mythos?

But Duck could understand that too, how worried she had been that Mythos would discover she was either a duck or Princess Tutu. Yet there was something not quite right with Rue's words.

"You loved him even when you found him as the Raven Prince," Duck worked out slowly. "And he loved you even after he found out you were Princess Kraehe. Doesn't that make it strong? Doesn't love mean seeing all someone is and still loving them?" Even as she said those last words, Duck heard them echo strangely in her mind. Where had she heard that phrase before? _As he found all that you truly are..._

Duck was so lost in her own thoughts, she almost missed all of Rue's response. "...how can I show that side of myself to him? Vain and selfish and jealous and preening. Ever since we have returned to his kingdom, he has become a fairytale prince. And I, I am only human. Perhaps I am something even worse than that, for I almost destroyed him once, with my love."

"But you also saved him, with that same love."

But no matter how hard she tried, Duck could not convince Rue otherwise. In the end, the only thing the two girls could decide on was that they could do nothing more than play at normalcy until speaking with the prince and the knight.

* * *

When Autor saw Rue walking casually towards the girls' locker room, he felt a stab of panic. He barely registered the eager whispers of other students gossiping about the elegant upperclassman Rue returning from her ballet tour.

Had another story been set into motion all over again? Because of _him_? Excitement thrilled through his body at the thought, that he had at last grasped the power he'd desired since he had been old enough to read.

As he looked on and saw Rue emerge in her dark red practice clothes, Duck trailing behind her, he could not help wondering with a touch of unease just how far reaching had been the effects of his authoring.

Autor tried to push away the tendrils of fear that furled around his heart.

* * *

Mythos could sense something akin and not akin to the raven. He had scoured the woods surrounding the town all day, but had come out empty-handed. As the sun set, he at last ventured into the town to continue his hunting of ravens into the night.

He had walked, carefully and silently down empty streets, looking for a hint of a dark feather, straining his ear for a raucous cry. And at last he had heard it. At the end of a narrow, dark street, he found a building that cast squares of light from its windows onto the ground outside. He could here bustling from within. A battered wooden sign read _Lethe Tavern_.

As Mythos pushed open the door, he heard another spate of the cawing laughter that had drawn his attention in the first place. Yet when he looked around, all he found were men and women and he wondered if he was merely hearing echoes from his own memories. None of the carousing patrons paid any attention to the slight youth in his nondescript worn gray cloak and trousers and Mythos would have left as quietly as he had entered, but for the unexpected sight of Charon at the bar.

The man was slumped over a mug of ale, his eyes shadowed. In surprise and concern, Mythos walked up to him. It was then that he saw the raven. Small, and vicious looking, barely a fledgling, it perched on Charon's shoulder. It was ugly and ungainly, covered all over in the charcoal-colored tufts of a nestling. And although it had the sharp merciless beak of a monster, it had the small bright, curious eyes of a hatchling. No one else seemed to notice it.

When Mythos bent down to touch Charon on the shoulder gently, the raven hopped from one foot to the other. The man lifted his head and Mythos was taken aback by the hollowness in his eyes. His eyes were dull and black and full of despair, as if a raven had come to roost in them.

And although Mythos couldn't begin to unravel just what was going on, he knew that this clumsy, voracious bird was at the heart of it. He reached out a hand and plucked it from Charon's shoulder and stared at a thing that could cause so much pain and yet looked so fragile in his hands.

The wretched creature clawed him with its talons and drew blood, but as Mythos cupped the raven nestling in his palms, he realized he would not be able to kill it. After all, he was the prince who had run into a burning building to save caged birds even before he had known he was a prince meant to do such things.

Mythos turned once more to the man beside him, whose eyes had finally started to show hints of awareness, as if the raven feathers in them had begun to part, as if he was at last emerging from a long, tortured dream. Mythos rested one hand again on Charon's shoulder, and murmured "I will take this burden from you, dear friend. Rest now."

* * *

It was late when Mythos snuck himself into Rue's room. He had wandered the streets aimlessly, unable to bring himself to see her with this proof of his weakness, but at last conceding there was nothing else to do, he made his way to the Goldcrown Fine Arts Academy.

Rue woke with a start at the sound of his soft footsteps. "Mythos, what happened?" she asked, alarmed at seeing him clutching his hands to his chest and lighting her desk lamp.

He looked nervously at her, and at last, held out his hands to her. "I could not kill it, though it is a raven," he whispered at last, the weight of his failure heavy on his shoulders.

"Oh my prince," she sighed and slipping on a dressing gown that was mostly lace, she embraced him because this was part of what she had fallen in love with in the first place.

Of course, when she saw the claw marks all over his fingers, she could not bring herself to forgive the bird so easily. And once it began an incessant cawing racket, she felt murderous enough that some of her anger and irritation showed through. "Stupid bird," she cursed under her breath as she made Mythos set the thing down so she could take care of his hands. "Be _quiet_," she hissed at it, her eyes widening in horror when, after giving one more petulant caw, it did. Was she princess of ravens still, that this little monster obeyed her?

She looked up, anxious, afraid that Mythos might have noticed, might have seen that part of her she had wanted to erase. The part that was dark and ugly and full of emotions that the Monster Raven had played upon. But Mythos merely smiled at her, and she sighed in relief that he had not heard her words or noticed her expression in the gloom.

* * *

Duck woke to a quiet but insistent knocking at her door interspersed with muffled caws. It tugged her away from a dream of green eyes that smiled at her softly before turning icy; a sword made of night lunged at her. When she was finally able to control her eyelids enough to force them open, she was surprised to find it still pitch black outside. The dream had already started to drift away like cobwebs before a strong wind. The knocking and cawing continued. Puzzled and a little worried, she opened the door to find Mythos and Rue at her threshold.

"Mythos!" she exclaimed, still half-asleep and too disoriented to process anything more than that.

Rue pushed her way into the room and said in a sharp whisper, "Duck, let us in before this wretched thing wakes the rest of the dorm." At once she regretted her words, at having lost the poise and serenity she had cultivated to match Mythos' courage and kindness, but at least she had not addressed the bird again, had not betrayed how much raven was in her still.

But perhaps the situation would prevent her from calling too much attention to herself, for Mythos did not even notice. A stray part of her mind wondered if he noticed her at all anymore, and she silenced it viciously with the thought that it was better to be loved and overlooked than not to be loved at all. She could not fathom now how she had borne all those years when Mythos had been a heartless doll only able to give her a reflection of the love she craved in the practiced answers and responses she told him to give.

Mythos and Rue explained all, and Duck felt her heart flutter with worry when Mythos mentioned Charon. "But I just saw him and there was nothing wrong! Well, that's not true—he wasn't himself at all, but I didn't see a raven haunting him."

"No one else seemed to notice, either, at the tavern," Mythos mused. "But you can both see it clearly now?" he asked, hold up the indignant bird whose claws Rue had roughly wound in scraps of cotton. "I wonder..."

"Duck and I will look for more with you tomorrow."

"No." The objection, surprisingly, came from Duck. "No," she repeated. "I can't. I have to find Fakir. He doesn't know what's going on and....and I'm worried about him." Despite their quizzical looks, Duck would not say any more. She and Fakir had been partners, almost from the start. When he had finally figured out that Princess Tutu had been trying her hardest for the sake of the Prince, they had worked together. It startled her to realize now, that Fakir had been by her side almost from the beginning and she felt a strange ache thinking that he wasn't beside her now.

Duck shook herself out of her thoughts to catch the tail end of Rue's request to Mythos, "...let me come with you."

"No, my princess, I want you safe here."

And Rue, who had been on the verge of protesting, looked down and silenced herself.

At last, Rue and Mythos had departed, without the bird. Duck had taken one look at it and been moved to pity, offering to care for it until the hatchling could fend for itself. Rue had looked relieved, but Mythos had worried. "Do you think it's a mistake, Tutu, to let this thing live?"

Duck considered the angry mass of feathers now safely bundled in her hands. "Kindness can never be a mistake," she smiled in response.

She found out to her dismay the next morning that it was a mean-spirited, thankless little wretch that bit her fingers as she tried to feed it. But then, Duck thought, as she threw open her windows to a flock of multi-colored birds, that was how some wild things should be.

* * *

Despite his anxiety from earlier that day at seeing Rue returned to Goldcrown Town, Autor had made himself continue with his nightly study of Fakir's manuscript and spent many hours poring over what alteration to make next. He would not allow fear to prevent him from realizing his destiny.

Instead, Autor imagined how Fakir would be jerked around on puppet strings to the pattern he was so carefully laying out, one singed word at a time. As he painstakingly worked over yet another page, he did not see the hooded figure that skulked outside his window.

He had just finished the page when he heard a heavy, ominous knocking at his door, as if the wood was being struck with the handle of an executioner's blade.

* * *

_(1) A very mangled version of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven."_


	12. Chapter 12

_Once upon a time there was a man who loved a woman who was a bird. He had come across a white crane with an arrow in her wing and cared for her until she was strong enough to fly away. _

_One day soon after, a woman as graceful as a white crane arrived at his doorstep. They married, but were poor, their fortunes fading hourly. She promised him all the wealth he desired, anything for his happiness as long as he swore never to enter the room where she set up her loom. _

_The man, overjoyed by the riches he gained from her weaving, forced her to work more and more until, at last, he was so consumed with the desire to discover her secret, he entered her closed room and found a white crane working on a cold loom, each thread a feather that fell from her skin, until threadbare she grew thin._

_Her secret betrayed, the crane wife cried out in anguish and flew away, never to return. It was only then that the truth raked at the man's heart: she had dyed the silk woven from her feathers with her own heart's blood. It shone with all the beauty of her pain and love. (1)_

* * *

Mythos disappeared like mist before sunlight and Rue awoke alone in her room in the girls' dorm, wondering if she had merely dreamed him and her entire life into existence. Shaking away such morbid, useless thoughts, she dressed and somehow found her way to Duck's small attic room. Startled at the clatter punctuated by exasperated raven caws emanating from within, Rue knocked on the door sharply, only for the sounds of chaos to increase.

"Duck! What are you doing in there? Open the door!"

A jumble, a tumble, and then at last, Duck with hair awry, covered in seed husks and bird feathers smiled into Rue's worried face while the older girl could merely blink in her surprise.

Somehow, before Duck had any sense of what was happening, Rue had her cleaned up, dressed, brushed, and prepared.

"But Rueeeeee!" Duck complained, "It's still so early, I was going to lie in some more before getting ready for class! Pique and Lillie won't even stop by for another hour."

"And that's exactly why you're in the beginner class," Rue had responded ruthlessly. "Besides, if you're going to look for Fakir, aren't the practice rooms the first place you should check?"

But Duck would not meet her eyes as the two girls walked to the ballet building. "He won't be there," she whispered at last. "He's been avoiding me."

"Duck?"

But Duck merely shook her head, laughed a false note and smiled, "Forget I said that, Rue! I'll make sure to figure out what's going on with him, even if—" but she left the rest unspoken. _Even if he doesn't like me anymore_.

As Duck had predicted, Fakir was not in the practice room. But rather than allowing Duck to descend into gloomy thoughts, Rue had relentlessly bullied her into practicing. There was nothing like ballet to ease away worries, Rue thought as she corrected Duck's form again as she set Duck working on the basics under her watchful eye.

Or at least that is what she was thinking until she began her own routine. Even as she heard Duck calling out the steps to herself under her breath, the muscles in Rue's calves quivered, her foot twisted, and she stumbled. Her head bowed, she heard in her memory, as if from another lifetime, "If you take a one day break from ballet, you will know it. If you take a two day break, those around you will know it. And if you take a one-week break, your audience will know it."

How many timeless days had passed since she had devoted herself seriously to dance? How could she have let the girl Rue fade away so completely? She would reinscribe the movements into her body's memory once more even if it left her feet bloody, she thought grimly, and began again.

* * *

Fakir did not come to classes that day, he was nowhere to be found. Duck knew this because she searched the town for him.

Rue did not leave the practice room until it was so late that even the moon had set and she did not have enough light to dance by. She stumbled to her room to find Mythos waiting for her, another ravenous fledgling in his hands and she wanted to laugh at the strange routine they had fallen into as they made their way to Duck's room again.

Duck made room for the second fledgling in the small lined basket she had prepared on her desk and fished out insects from a jar crawling with them—she had cared for injured birds long enough to have the foresight to collect their supper while she wandered through the forest searching for Fakir all evening for just this purpose—and Rue watched with a grimace of disgust as the two raucous creatures fought over their meal.

But Mythos did not notice, and instead gazed into the black nothingness of window with a frown of determination. "I must find the source of these ravens. This time, I will put a stop to it before the town descends into chaos again. I will fight the Raven to the end," he vowed, telling himself not to think of why he couldn't bring himself to kill these fledglings of his adversary. He would not let his heart waver.

And Rue wondered just what she had been doing all day, dancing away as if nothing were the matter.

* * *

Rue had coerced Duck into another bout of early morning practice but could not keep her there after classes. Rue had decided not to try out for the upcoming production of Sleeping Beauty that the ballet students would perform at the annual school festival. She did not think she could do Princess Aurora any justice as she was now. That all the others, students and instructors both assumed she was being magnanimous and giving the chance to others who would not have it otherwise since her own skill was that much superior made her burn in shame even more.

She had found an empty practice room for herself as the advanced class was often left to its own devices and went through the basics mercilessly. She knew the practice was worthless because her mind was elsewhere, so how could her body possibly follow? And yet she did not stop.

At last, one shadow detaching itself from the doorway brought her to a halt. "You!" she exclaimed in surprise.

* * *

Duck had been surprised when the ballet instructor had approached her during morning lessons, suitably impressed by her recent early morning efforts brought on by Rue, to tell her she would be allowed a part in the latest production after all. She was to be a handmaiden of a handmaiden of the Princess Aurora. She would be as much a prop as the painted trees behind her, there to add a touch of color. But it was much more than Duck had ever hoped for, and just to be part of something so beautiful was enough for her. Her first thought had been to wonder how Fakir would tease her when she told him. She felt a pang in her heart.

But that was how she found herself in the girls' dressing room trying on the costume so alterations could be made in time. She pushed all gloomy thoughts out of her head forcibly as she tried to knot her hair into a chignon only to have it all fall awry.

"Oh, silly Duck!" Lillie giggled. "You'll have to take your braid out first!"

"Where's Pique?" Duck asked, twisting her neck around to try to find the other girl only to have Lillie yank her head back in place.

"Sit still, Duck! Or we'll never get your wild mane under control and then they might decide you're too wild to be a handmaiden and then..." Lillie continued as she helped Duck unwind and brush out the long braid from the twisted knot Duck had wrangled it into in her earlier attempts.

Duck had long since learned the art of strategic listening from having been friends with Lillie for so long and her mind did not tune in to the blonde's words until she heard Pique's name mentioned again, "...we just happened to come across him in town earlier today. And then we just happened to follow him for a bit, and then Pique just happened to decide to keep following him."

Somehow, she already knew the answer, but she couldn't stop herself from asking, "Who?"

"Why, Fakir of course! Maybe she will confess her love!" Lillie squealed as she pulled a brush deftly through Duck's knee-length hair. "Oh, Duck are you burning up with jealousy?"

"Where, where did you see them last?" Duck interrupted anxiously.

"I think he was stalking off towards the lake. Oh, a battle between love and friendship, how exciting! How do you feel, Duck? Are you crushed, Duck? Betrayed? Heart-broken?"

But Duck didn't have time to answer as she ran out of the dressing room, a feeling of foreboding settling in her stomach. She did not stop for shoes or even ballet slippers, still in her pale yellow ballet costume, like the palest light of sunrise, with dawn-colored rosebuds bordering her waist and askew in her hair, all pale oranges and pinks; her hair, meant to be coiled tightly around her head in a chignon so as not to get in the way during the performance was flowing down wildly in long red-orange waves as she had run out of the changing room in the first rush of panic.

The same unease in her heart that had told her just who Pique had followed also told her that she had to find Fakir before Mythos did.

* * *

"I never learned your name," Rue told him.

"Autor," he responded. "A writer in name only." The glasses hid his eyes. "I never meant to drag you into this."

Rue frowned at the strange riddle of a boy in front of her. "What do you mean?"

"I didn't think my hand in the story would pull you into it too. I really did love you."

At that, Rue relented, remembering what his love had meant to her when she had thought only monsters could love her. "I know," she said in a soft voice.

"But now the story will not have mercy for any of us since they will not have any mercy on it."

But Rue was not a princess in name only. "Explain yourself at once."

"He wanted to write a story."

"Fakir? For Mythos? I know that already. Stop speaking in riddles."

"No, for Princess Tutu, by removing his own heart and giving it to her. But he knew that leaving such a manuscript untended was dangerous, so he entrusted it to me."

Rue had been bathed in Raven's blood since before she learned human words and so she could hear what Autor did not say, she could hear the darkness in his heart because there was some in her own. "But he hadn't counted on your own ambitions and desires," she finished for him. "And you meddled." He flinched and pushed the glasses up his nose with a shaky hand. "What happened to the story?"

"They took it. Those who are sworn to prevent dangerous stories from being born, the executioners. The bookmen."

"Then what are you doing here?!" she demanded. "What am _I _waiting around here for?" Rue strode out of the practice room.

"What? Where are you going?" Autor asked, taken aback.

"To find them. You said the story would not have any mercy on us if the bookmen destroyed it."

"Are you insane? They almost killed me when they found me!"

"Then don't come." But she was done with regret, she was done with doubt. Princess Tutu, Rue remembered, danced effortlessly, but she Rue, danced on blood and sinew. She had tried to hide away that desperate, human part of her so that she would never lose Mythos love. But if she lost herself, could she even feel the warmth of his love? She would find that little girl she had been, the one who had danced pointe until her blistered feet bled. This time, she would not just be the princess who needed saving.

Of course that meant Autor could do nothing but follow.

* * *

It was a romantic era tutu rather than a classical one, which had been a surprising costuming choice for Sleeping Beauty. She and Pique and Lillie had wondered at it and the memory of that laughter-filled conversation felt like a lifetime away. That same gauzy skirt now fluttered around Duck's knees as she stood frozen in shock. She watched the Darkest Knight plunge his sword into Pique's heart as the pink-haired girl looked on, first in horror and then in dazed misery. Somehow, the reeds continued to rustle in the wind as if nothing was amiss, the lake water sparkled tranquilly, and the sun looked on serenely.

Duck felt her knees gave way under her, heedless of crumpling yellow skirt, of her tangled, tumbling hair. "Pique," she whispered and at last made her way over to her fallen friend and helped her lean against a tree. But Duck saw no raven nestling near her, only a stunned pain, until she looked into Pique's eyes and found a ravenous sorrow cawing back at her before Pique closed her eyes, unconscious.

She could not bring herself to look up at Fakir for a long moment because she knew she had done this to him, by taking his heart and so thoughtlessly keeping it.

He saw the sorrow and anguish in her face and said in a low, pained voice, "The Princess of Mourning," and then with a grief he did not know he was still capable of feeling, "Have I created you too—that sorrow in your eyes?"

But even in the depths of his despair, even with his heart incomplete there were some things Fakir knew to the marrow of his bones. "No. Not mourning. The Princess of Morning, the dawn that persists in the face of the darkest night."

"Fakir, why are you doing this?"

"What choice do I have?" he spat out bitterly. "There is a despair in their hearts that calls to my own and I cannot rest until I free it."

Duck touched a hand unconsciously to the broken pendant at her neck and then reached out to Fakir, to where his heart should be. "I'm so sorry," she said, her voice like her heart breaking.

"Are we at this impasse again? You will not take all my heart and I will not take back the rest." A cruel, bitter smile crossed his lips. But the viciousness was directed only against himself. "What a worthless, unwanted thing."

"Fakir, we can't continue like this!" Duck yelled at him because she didn't know how else to make that cutting cruelty stop. "It's lonely, without you."

"Even though this," he mocked, gesturing in the direction of the fallen Pique, "is part of who I am?"

"This is a part of you, not all of you. You found the worst parts of me and didn't turn away—not just that Princess Tutu was Duck or that Duck was a duck, but you found out all I truly am and didn't look away, even when you learned how selfish I am when I couldn't return Mythos' heart to him. So, yes. Even though this is part of who you are. There's no meaning to my being human without you."

"And there's no meaning to my having a heart without a girl named Duck."

_Then take mine instead_, Duck wanted to say.

But Duck would never know how Fakir would have responded to her offer, born at once from impulse and from her deepest desires, because in that moment Mythos appeared and she did not speak.

Mythos took in the sable-clad Fakir and the fallen girl with the shadow of a fledgling raven hovering near her and said, neutrally, "I sensed a Raven, and so I came."

"You, this is your fault," Fakir hissed, a cold anger burning at the sight of the prince who he had loved so much and who had cost him all this sorrow. "If only you had chosen her for your princess, I would never have become the monster I am now, with a heart as black as raven feathers."

There was only one way for Mythos to understand those words, and even though he felt as if his heart was about to fracture all over again, shatter of its own accord, there was only one way for him to respond to them: he was sworn to battle the Monster Raven. And yet, to raise his sword against his truest knight....Was it the raven's blood within him that made him hesitate? Had the taint of the Raven within him spread?

This was his duty, his fate and no one else's. He could not waver. Transforming into the prince he was, Mythos drew his sword, "Step back, Tutu."

* * *

"We should have cut off his hands before it came to this," an old voice rasped.

"Whose? The spinner's? Or the boy who's guided him?"

"Both," a third more querulous tone added. "Dangerous stories must not be born," he recited.

"We were fools to trust in him last time. And all because a legend we never dreamed of came to life to save him."

"Princess Tutu," yet another voice whispered, half-wishful, half-disbelieving, into the silence.

"Destroying endings didn't serve us but now we can put an end to this one and for all. Now we have _that_ manuscript."

"We can't be too hasty. We must only act when we have no other choice."

"And that's exactly what led us here. We hesitated in our duty. We should have cut off that young spinner's hands when he knelt before Drosselmeyer's grave and tossed them in with the old man's. We should have silenced that boy as soon as his glasses started reflecting stories."

"Then let us rid ourselves of the manipulations of spinners forever."

Old, wrinkled hands, bent like claws took up the manuscript. It was a blend of pages old and new almost all pocked with burn marks and covered with two hands—although the burn marks were like a third, invisible hand among them—an elegant flowing penmanship and a crabbed meticulous one, and thrust it into the fire. The last page burned first, its edges curling up as tongues of flame licked at the words, devouring the stories line by line until nothing remained but ashes.

A dark mist escaped the burning pages, more acrid than any smoke and seemed to consume the world.

* * *

And at that moment, beside the lake with his blade drawn, the knight rushed at his prince. Their swords clashed, and the two drove at each other mercilessly. Neither was holding back, as Fakir had when Mythos as the Raven Prince had attacked him.

Duck clutched the broken pendant in her hand and wished with all her might to turn into Princess Tutu. She had been able to transform before for Mythos' sake, so why couldn't she transform now when she needed to so desperately to save both him and Fakir? But no matter how hard she wished, she did not feel the change overtaking her body and only then realized that even when she quacked in surprise, even when she spoke in a duck-like voice, Fakir's heart had never returned her to just a duck.

And now, no matter how hard she gripped the pendant in her desperate fingers, her palm bleeding on its jagged edges, no matter how badly she wished to turn into the graceful princess, into the magical white bird who could save both the men before her by sacrificing herself, Fakir's heart refused to transform her into anything but herself. For him, she was always Duck.

"My heart's desire—" She heard Fakir's voice addressing her, coming from her own heart and looked down in surprise to find the broken pendant glowing a beautiful, warm red. Her pulse raced at the thought that she was that to him. _Why?_ she wondered, surprised at her own emotions. The light of Fakir's broken heart enveloped her and she felt all the warmth of being cradled in his arms as she had when she was a duck.

But his voice continued, full of sadness, "—was to give you yours. I wanted you to make choices for your own sake for once. Not for him. Not for me. Not for anyone else. Only you. But I can't seem to give you anything but pain."

"Fakir," Duck whispered back at the fading light of the pendant. "Why don't you ever understand _anything_?!"

That was the only response she had time for because the knight and prince were preparing to strike again, both with such looks of resolution that Duck knew there was only way for this battle to end.

She leaped in front of Fakir, not only for Mythos' sake, not only for Fakir's, but her own. Because it would break him once he realized what he had done—that he had raised his sword against the person he had sworn to protect, the person he would have given his life to protect—and that would break her too. She did not stop to remember that Fakir had sworn to protect her too.

Mythos, who was further away from her, was able to draw back his blade sharply, but time was flowing too swiftly to stop the course of events already in motion and Fakir's sword was already poised at her breast.

A part of Duck that was not caught up in the intensity and immediacy of the moment was surprised to feel the pendant move of its own accord. It shifted just a heartbeat to the left and got in the way, slowing the sword down just enough and yet not enough.

The pendant shattered, but it did not stop the sword and there was a beautiful red spray of crystalline heart fragments and blood. Time seemed to slow for Fakir, crawl haltingly, as he watched Duck fall.

* * *

_(1) Based on the Japanese myth of the crane wife; some of the language derived from lyrics of "Crane Wife 1 & 2" and "Crane Wife 3" by The Decemberists._


	13. Chapter 13

_Once upon a time, there was a girl locked in a tower by a witch. She fell in love with a prince who visited her secretly, but the witch, as witches always will, discovered them and pushed the prince to his death as he climbed up the tower to meet his love._

_The briar roses that surrounded the tower had also fallen in love with the prince and enfolded him in their thorny, piercing embrace as he screamed. _

_In the end, the girl defeated the witch on her own and escaped and searched the world over for her prince. At last she found him, a poor blind beggar unable to return to his kingdom, and wept for his suffering: her tears fell like a gentle, healing rain into his torn eyes. (1)_

* * *

For a few moments after entering into the sudden gloom of the bookshop, all Rue could see was darkness. Even when her eyes had adjusted to the dim light from the windows covered over by stacks of books, all she could make out of Autor, who was right beside her, were the gleam of his glasses and the light smudge of not-darkness created by the white of his school uniform. An unnatural murkiness hung over the room and a dark, insidious smoke hovered in the corners.

"Is anyone there?" she called out.

Only a feeble indistinct moan answered her. Rue looked at Autor in alarm. "It sounded like it came from the backroom."

They wove their way through the maze of bookshelves and found a small door tucked away between towering bookcases. Within was a small room with one small window slightly open, the rest of the room crowded with books and a small fireplace with a dying fire in the far wall and a series of curious figures hunched in a circle. They did not move.

At last, Rue approached them cautiously. With the weak light cast by the fire, she could make out the face of an old man as he huddled in a chair. She snatched her hand back in surprise almost as soon as she touched his shoulder. "He-he's made of stone," she whispered.

Autor who had stood transfixed in the doorway until then, made his way around the circle, "Statues all," he marveled.

"This is no time to be admiring the handiwork!" Rue snapped back at him out of fear and dread. "We have to find out where the noise—" she saw one figure slumped in a corner beside the fireplace, the gloom hiding him from immediate view.

She knelt beside him to find an old man half-stone, half-flesh. He drew a rasping breath, "T-the s-story..."

Rue listened in horror, her face paling. "_What have you done?_"

* * *

There were no cracks in Duck's heart to catch the sword and stop it from drawing blood. Heart shards mingled with a shimmering spray of blood and all seemed to hang in the air a moment before falling, as if held by the power of Fakir's desperate regret. _What have I done?_ But he was too numb for thought. Each glistening drop of her blood, each sparkling splinter of his heart, the strangled cry of agony that caught in her throat, the blue of her eyes glazing over in pain, all stabbed him with a bone-chilling horror.

"No." he whispered as he caught her limp, falling body. And then, he felt a searing pain, as if the fragments of his heart still left in his body had splintered along with the pendant and like chips of broken glass were trying to pull their way out of his chest, and a scream was torn out of him. "No!" As if some frantic part of him hoped that with that one word he could turn back time and undo the nightmare he had wrought with his own hands. This was what his twisted heart had given birth to. The prince and the raven both had emerged from Drosselmeyer—good as well as evil. But evil alone seemed to reside in Fakir's own heart.

"Duck." He cradled her small form in his arms. But her eyelids were falling, her breathing shallow as the pool of blood around her grew and he was left holding a pile of bloodied and crumpled tulle and the small, frail body of a yellow duck, her feathers stained crimson and slick with her own heartsblood. A wound that would have been dangerous to a girl would be fatal to a duck. Anger and sorrow and terror ran a jagged path through his veins.

All he knew how to feel was pain. Fate had come full circle. It could not be escaped. He was the knight torn in two, he was certain from the wrenching in his heart. He was the ghost knight who had blindly cut down his own lover. Was there no escape?

"Mythos," he turned with pain-stunned eyes to the prince who had watched frozen, unable to change the tragedy playing out before him. "Your sword," and raising his left hand to his heart even as his right arm cradled Duck's limp body, Fakir bowed his head. "I beg you."

The prince hesitated, for before him knelt the youth who had sworn to be his knight when he was still but a child, the one who had striven to protect him when he had been heartless and helpless, when he had been corrupted and raven enough to attack innocents. The bond of fealty and friendship tied them together. Mythos' wavering heart had been able to force him to attack and fight when he feared Fakir to be yet another incarnation of the Monster Raven that seemed to bedevil him still, but he could not raise his blade against his friend seeing him broken and grief-stricken and so _human_ before him.

Mythos did not know what to do—to grant his friend's last request and take his life or to make him take hold of his life with unwilling hands when it seemed all reason for it had fled. Was this choice the penance he had to pay for all the harm he had unwittingly wreaked while heartless and then foul-hearted?

At last, Mythos raised his blade reluctantly, light, like his heart, wavering on its very edge. Fakir did not raise his head, weary resignation etched in every line of his body as he waited and wished for the sword to fall. He wanted to weep—he was back to exactly where he was before this entire mess started: Duck was not beside him and his life meaningless, now worse than meaningless—but knew he was no longer capable of tears.

And in that moment, like the answer to a dream, Princess Tutu appeared.

The faint red glow cast by the blood that shone so brilliantly in the bright sunlight and the heart shards that glittered within it like a discarded treasure coalesced into Duck, into Princess Tutu.

Not the Princess Tutu called out by Mythos's heart, the elegant human princess. But the Princess Tutu shaped from the very core of Duck's being, who had faced the Monster Raven in that final battle: the duck-like princess who had wings in place of arms and possessed enough hope to lighten the darkest despair. There was no pendant about her neck; she had transformed from the power of her own heart.

Her figure was faint and wispy and translucent, but undeniably Duck as she reached out with distressed feathered arms, tears glistening in her eyes. "No! You can't!" but it was unclear who she was pleading with—Fakir or Mythos.

At the sound of her voice, Fakir's head jerked upward, to find himself surrounded by a sparkling red so warm and lovely that he was certain he must be within Duck's heart for no other place could be so heartbreakingly beautiful.

The glowing red image of Duck reached out towards him with both wings, cupping his face with feathers. But her touch was elusive, like the caress of wind on his skin; so insubstantial, it was as if she had never existed in the first place and when he reached out to grasp her feathered shoulders, his hands passed through her entirely. There was nothing for him to do but weep or dance.

And so they danced, a _pas de deux_ without touch, a dance that Fakir hoped would never end for this was all that fate allowed him. They promenaded, but he was still the useless knight he had always been. His hand on her waist did not support her as it should and he knew that he was no fit partner for her, that she was beyond his touch. But he could, would not, draw away. Something ached and trembled in his chest as he realized that he grasped air when he tried to lift her and she must jump on her own power.

At this, the tears he was no longer capable of burned in his eyes, spilling down his cheeks unheeded. The dark, broken pieces of glass that were still lodged in his chest melted, tears falling like molten silver from his eyes as the frozen gray within them thawing back into green. The glow of Fakir's heart shards surrounded the two of them and all the emotions he had not felt for weeks came rushing back to him. Guilt consumed him and despair, for what he had mercilessly done to Duck and to countless others as the Darkest Knight. There was nothing for him to do but weep and dance.

"It was wrong. It was a lie," he said as he felt the memory of her touch once more as she curved her body backwards within the useless circle of his arms. "When I told you to let go of Drosselmeyer's story and return to your true self. That the real you is a duck just because at the time Mythos' heart was what gave you human form. The real you is as human as your heart. Much more human than I am. Kindness and hope overflow from your heart and only a killing, monstrous despair from mine."

"Fakir," Duck answered softly, curving her wings upward, his arms shadowing and surrounding hers. She mimed the words to him with her ballet as she spoke, "Ever since you gave it to me,  
I've carried your heart with me (I carried it in  
my heart). I was never without it (anywhere  
I went you went, with me; and whatever was done  
by only me was your doing too).  
I know what kindness is in your heart, and what love. So won't you forgive yourself?" She gestured towards his chest and then towards her own, cupping her wingtips as if she cradled something of infinite value within them.

He stared at her, startled and at last whispered, "How is it that when you are beside me I fear no fate, I want no world? Is it that you are my fate, my world,  
that you are whatever a moon has always meant  
and whatever a sun will always sing is you?"

He mimed heartfelt emotion, his left palm on his heart with the fingers of his right hand beating on the back of the left, and reached out towards her, but his arms halted before he could finish the movement and instead withered into sorrow, all the joy and hope mimed earlier were consumed in despair. "All these things were never meant for me."

Heavy-hearted, he watched her dance. Hers was no longer the elegant, flawless ballet of the fairytale ballerina. With her duck-like wings, her movements, her miming were no longer as precise, as perfect. And yet, her dancing overflowed as much as ever with her heart, with her self.

"We'll help them together, Pique and the others. This time, I'll promise always to stay by your side," Duck vowed, and though she could not raise two fingers above her head in promise, she curved her wing above her and he could read the sincerity of her intent in every line of her body. _(2)_

And yet sincerity, he knew, was not enough. "How? How will you keep such an impossible promise? I tried. I tried going against your fate and mine and look what I've wrought!" Self-mockery tinged his voice and his body language as he gestured at her insubstantial figure as she pirouetted before him.

But her only response was a smile and at last she said through mime the words she wanted to before all this grief had overtaken them: _If you can give your heart to me, then I can give mine to you._

Fakir's eyes widened in disbelief, for what he had grasped for, even as a child, had always, always been out of his reach. "Idiot, do you even know what you're saying?" he whispered, unable to believe the meaning of her dance.

And even as his voice was exasperated and incredulous, there was a touch of desperation to it and Duck thought, _yes, the Oak Tree was right. This is all of who Fakir really is. This is the Fakir I missed and longed for all these lonely weeks._ _The one who tries to fix all the problems on his own, always wanting to solve everything by himself. Always forgiving the faults of those he loved, but never his own. _

_Those he loved._ Duck's movements slowed, a small gasp of sudden realization escaping her. Somehow, in that instant she finally grasped with a startling clarity just why he had written the story he had for her and wondered how she could have failed to see its meaning until now.

She looked up, finishing an arabesque, but Fakir's eyes refused to meet hers, as if seeing would be disbelieving and everything would unravel as nothing more than a wonderful dream before his eyes.

Duck fluttered to his side en pointe, opened her feathered arms and encircled Fakir's shoulders as he bowed his head in hopelessness. _Yes_, she mimed with a nod of her head, "Yes, now I do." She closed her eyes and leaned against his chest. Although she was as intangible as a wisp of a dream and her touch no more than the brush of breeze on his skin, Fakir felt the enveloping warmth of her embrace course through his limbs and into his frozen, fractured heart.

He did not care that her touch would be only a memory. Fakir raised his arms and cradled her luminous, airy form against his heart. Opening her eyes, Duck studied his face a moment, his eyes closed and the forgotten track of tears drying on his face. She tilted her head upward and closed the distance between them, kissing his tears and tasting the bitterness of them. And he felt as if he had found out  
the deepest secret nobody knows  
(the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows  
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)  
and the wonder that's keeping the stars apart._ (3)_ And together they danced _hope_, _love_.

They moved through the coda of the _pas de deux_. "Will you let me carry your heart then," he asked, "in my heart? Since I have already given you mine, forever."

She brushed him one more time with her insubstantial feathered arms, and smiled. "Yes."

The blood and heart shards beneath their feet mingled and came together, like the interlocking stones of the jewel Courage, and emitted a blinding flash of light.

* * *

For one frantic moment, Fakir wondered if Duck had vanished, but the two of them had merely returned to the side of the lake, both the transformations of the Darkest Knight and Princess Tutu having undone themselves. But then there was no more time for idle thought for Duck lay before him, still bleeding. He frantically stripped off the coat and shirt of his school uniform, covering her body with the blue jacket and trying to staunch her chest wound with the fabric of his shirt.

Mythos had watched in surprise and wonder as Fakir danced with a large white bird, the two of them surrounded by a soft red light that made seeing anything more than vague outlines difficult. Then the light had flared brilliantly and when his dazzled eyes could see again, he had found Fakir clutching a bleeding and barely conscious Duck to his chest.

"Fakir," she murmured, her voice fading, "are you ok?"

"Shh. Don't talk."

"She's alive?" Mythos breathed out in wonder.

"Barely," Fakir answered tersely.

As the two of them hurried Duck to the town hospital, neither noticed the statue of a girl who sat propped against a tree and looked blindly on, a fledgling raven perched on her marble head.

* * *

_(1) Based on Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm._

_(2) All information about ballet miming from ._

_(3) The entire unadulterated sonnet by e.e. cummings:_

_i carry your heart with me – e.e. cummings_

_i carry your heart with me(i carry it in_  
_my heart)i am never without it(anywhere_  
_i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done_  
_by only me is your doing,my darling)_  
_i fear_  
_no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want_  
_no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)_  
_and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant_  
_and whatever a sun will always sing is you_

_here is the deepest secret nobody knows_  
_(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud_  
_and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows_  
_higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)_  
_and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart_

_i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)_


	14. Chapter 14

_Once upon a time, a mortal woman plucked a rose and called to herself a fey lover. Fey though he was, he had been human once and swore to become so again for her love, if only she could steal him back from the Faerie Queen herself. _

_And so when he came riding a milk white horse in a company of the Queen's knights, the mortal woman stepped forward and held fast to him, no matter what shape he took by the Queen's magic. Adder or rose or burning brand, she held fast to love, in the end, unsure of what she had won. (1)_

* * *

Rue knew there was not a moment to lose—having been at the mercy of a story for most of her life, she knew that what she and Autor had uncovered was not to be trifled with. Her prince and the others needed to know at once just what they were facing.

It was then that she felt like cursing Mythos for the first time since he had regained his heart; she was almost too much in awe of him for having saved her to feel anything but adoration. She had been angry with him at him before, when he was heartless and incomplete, but never had she felt so infuriated by his carelessness. What if he too had fallen under the curse of the story? She had no way of knowing he was safe. Of all the harebrained schemes, to go off without leaving her any way of contacting him or finding him!

In the end, the only one she had any remote hope of tracking down was Duck. Mythos was unreachable and even Duck had no idea of about Fakir's whereabouts, but Rue could hardly blame the knight whom she had never gotten along with from being scarce when she was around. But Mythos! How could he be so thoughtless of her? _Why wouldn't he be_, a treacherous part of her whispered, _when you don't allow him to see any of your thoughts at all anymore, only smiles. _It was an admission she would never have been able to make to herself in the fairytale kingdom, where everything was perfect and luminous, and to admit a flaw in herself was to admit she did not belong.

There was no time for such thoughts now though, she told her self firmly as she climbed the final set of stairs to Duck's attic room. From the frantic cawing coming through the door, however, it seemed that Duck wasn't there. She was tempted to leave the miserable ravens to their fate, but an unexpected stab of pity stopped her—is this what Mythos had felt when he found the helpless things?—made her turn and open Duck's door.

"Honestly! Doesn't she realize how unsafe it is to leave her door unlocked?" Rue murmured under her breath, willfully ignoring the fact that she wouldn't have been able to enter if Duck _had_ been sensible enough to use a lock.

The fledgling ravens had wreaked havoc in Duck's room. Although to be fair, beyond the bird droppings splattered over the desk, Rue couldn't tell how much of the mess was the ravens' and how much Duck's. As soon as she entered the room, the nestlings began fluttering around her, half-hopping and half-flying, but maintaining the endless racket. There were only the two, but their frenetic movements made it seem like she was surrounded by half a dozen scraps of inept darkness. At last, one landed on a glass jar on Duck's desk and cawed imperiously. Stepping closer, Rue realized it was the jar of insects Duck used to feed them.

"Oh no," Rue told the birds as if they could understand her, "That is _not_ happening." But the fledglings kept cawing, half imperious, half begging and at last, Rue sighed and hung her head in resignation. "If you think I'm sticking my hand in there, you are sadly mistaken. Come along. If you get lost, it's your own fault."

The two ravens followed her out of the room and then out of the girl's dormitory and into a corner of the yard in front of the building. Squatting down, she unscrewed the lid of the jar and upended some of the insects onto the ground before capping it once more and stepping back hastily.

She watched as the raven fledglings bumbled about on clumsy wings and legs, trying to chase their suppers and could not help giggling at their antics. Until she saw them attempting to eat their catches, at which point she turned away utterly repulsed. No doubt Duck would give one of her carefree laughs if she were here to see Rue's squeamishness, and Mythos...

Shouldn't she know what he would think? She hadn't allowed herself to get to know the Mythos who changed, becoming more warm and alive with each heartshard Princess Tutu returned, so terrified was she of losing him to Princess Tutu's love. The heartless Mythos would not have known what to think, would have parroted whatever she wished, the raven-hearted Mythos would have taunted her for it, but this Mythos, what would he think? Had she made herself as much a stranger to him as he had become to her?

* * *

Heedless of the shocked passersby, Fakir and Mythos rushed a bleeding Duck to the Goldcrown Town infirmary. A startled look on the doctor's face, a flurry of activity, and then, endless waiting. Fakir paced relentlessly, forgetting Mythos and the infirmary entirely as his mind struggled to make sense of his actions of the past few weeks. How could he have—to _Charon_? to _Duck_? To so many others....

Mythos watched his friend and knight descend further into anguish with each step. "Just what is going on, Fakir?" Mythos asked not only for the answer, but to pull Fakir out of his silent self-recriminations.

Haltingly, Fakir laid out as much of the tale as he knew, "When Duck began losing her memory, I couldn't bear it anymore—I gave her my heart and my humanity to make her human again."

It hadn't been a very wise thing to do, Fakir knew, and no doubt Autor would not fail to point out his foolishness. The bespectacled boy, when first hearing of Fakir's plans had pointed out that in _The Prince and the Raven_ the removal of hearts had been labeled a forbidden power. Of course, Autor had made his observation in a goading, speculative way rather than as a warning, but Fakir had known from the start that his plan had been foolish and dangerous. His mistake lay in that he had thought it would be dangerous only to himself, and, when Duck's memory had been fading, when she seemed to slip away from him with each passing second, he did not care what dangers he exposed himself to.

"I thought if I wrote a story about myself, rather than about her, then even when I was gone my story couldn't control her, that it couldn't hurt her," Fakir concluded, laughing bitterly at the end. "A worthless knight can only become a worthless writer."

"You have always been my truest knight."

"How can you say that Mythos, when I raised my sword against you?"

"I too have raised my sword against you, against countless innocents. Did you ever think any less of me?"

"You've always been too kind for your own good," Fakir grumbled at last, but his heart wasn't in it. After a space in which Fakir could not bring himself to meet Mythos' eyes, he asked, "Do you know what happened to the girl at the lakeside...the one I attacked?"

"The pink-haired girl? I'm not certain. Once we learn Tutu's condition, I will go to check on her."

To keep Fakir from descending once more into a spiral of guilt, Mythos decided to hand him a mystery. He explained his and Rue's presence in the town, ending with his discovery of the fledgling ravens and the dazed townsfolk they haunted.

"The ravens are real?" Fakir asked in disbelief. "I thought they were a manifestation of despair, not real birds."

"They are very certainly real. I have the bite marks on my fingers to prove it," Mythos held up a hand with a rueful smile. "Vicious little things, but not evil. Or at least Tutu agrees with me that they aren't."

"The story then...it's far from over."

* * *

Autor had parted ways with Rue at the bookshop so absentmindedly, he was not sure how and when it happened, where she had gone or why. He had stumbled to the library unthinkingly and sat at his usual carrel, a habit so ingrained that it was as instinctive as breathing.

The curse of a scorned tale, the old man had called it, his flesh turning to stone even as he spoke, even as they watched. There was a difference, the bookman had said with a rueful grimace, between ripping out endings from finished tales to keep them from coming true and effacing unfinished tales and denying them even beginnings. The entire town had been caught up in the tale and now they too like the story would be unable to move forward.

Autor felt a stiffness in his bones, a prickle in his scalp and wondered if it was the effect of an overactive imagination, a belated rash of guilt and dread, or something more. After all, his had been the first hand to deface the unfinished tale. Was this the story he had authored for himself?

* * *

Fakir insisted on staying by Duck's side until she woke, not wanting her to wake disoriented and alone in a strange place. Anticipation and dread warred within him; he did not know how he would face her. He sat by her bed, a tentative hand reaching out for hers and he remembered another vigil, one she had kept for him and the missing Mythos.

As the setting sun sent orange light streaking through the window, Fakir watched Duck's eyes at last begin to flutter. He let out a breath he did not know he was holding when she opened her eyes. Following the gentle pressure on her hand, Duck's eyes found first Fakir's hand and then his worried face.

"Fakir, where..."

Before she could even finish her question, he was carefully helping her prop up a little against the pillows, offering her water for her parched mouth, and then helping her drink. Worry and concern etched in his frown as he answered her unfinished question, adding, "They said you shouldn't move around much or even try to really sit up yet since you lost so much blood. You won't be well enough to leave for a week or so."

"A whole week?" she murmured. "But I want to be back in my own room, with my own clothes," she said, plucking at the fabric of the hospital gown.

"You're not going anywhere but to Charon's house when you get out."

"Huh? Why?"

"I hardly trust you to take care of yourself when you're in full health, let alone when you're weakened and injured!"

"I'm not an idiot!"

He gave her that look, the one that always infuriated her because it said more clearly than any words that he didn't believe her. But even that little bit of anger had tired her, and she lay back against her pillows, breathing in deeply.

Fakir cursed himself as thrice a fool as he saw Duck getting worked up in response instead of resting as she should be. He swallowed his pride. "Duck, I know you can't forgive me, but please, just let me take care of you until I know you're better again."

Startled by the guilt and pain in his voice, Duck opened the eyes she had closed for a moment. "Fakir, this is my fault too. I know I should've given back your heart—"

"Never," he whispered fiercely. "When you began to lose your memory, I didn't care what I had to give up to get you back."

"And you think I'm the idiot," Duck couldn't help muttering.

"I heard that."

"Maybe because you were supposed to," she retorted.

And at that, somehow, they were both chuckling, laughter filled with relief more than anything else, that somehow despite fate they were together again. Fakir didn't care what else awaited them, didn't care that the story was not yet over as long as he was at Duck's side and she at his. For the first time in the past few anxiety-laden weeks, Duck felt at ease, as if she had somehow come home and wondered how strange the feeling was, considering the hospital was entirely unfamiliar to her. Perhaps all she needed was Fakir.

"You should rest now."

"No, wait—you didn't answer my question. I wasn't going to ask where am I, but _where were you_?" she demanded, and although she did not have the energy to be properly cross with him, a trace of anger colored her voice at her remembered weeks of worry for him.

"The monster raven had me." He continued, as if trying to remember a dream "I-it wasn't that I was hidden away. He had my heart, was a part of it."

"But how? Mythos defeated him!"

"I think," he frowned, working out the answer to a problem he was still unsure of, "there is a monster raven," he responded, "inside us all. Despair. I abandoned myself to it when I removed my heart."

"Then, is it all over?" she asked, just as uncertain.

And though she looked so frail now that it made his heart ache, he knew she would never forgive him for keeping this from her. "You know about the fledgling ravens?" he confirmed, and that was answer enough.

She sighed, closing her eyes; he shifted in his chair at her bedside, and reached for her hand once more as if he needed proof of her reality while she slept.

"Fakir," Duck ventured again after a protracted silence.

"You're supposed to be sleeping."

Duck snorted at that, her eyes still closed, not even dignifying that with a response. "What exactly happened by the lake?"

"You mean you don't remember?" he asked in a strangled voice. He continued, haltingly, "When—when I struck you, the broken pendant that was my heart shattered, and I think your heart did too. At least, that's the only reason I can think of for you appearing like a sort of mirage before me, like Mythos' heartshards used to. Both of our hearts had been split open and we were inside them, and that's why I think you were human when we danced and so was I." His voice faded into silence and he did not know if he could bring himself to continue. Duck opened her eyes, and Fakir was taken aback all over again by how intensely blue they were.

"I remember all that—I lost blood not my memory," Duck complained, the dull throbbing pain in her chest making her irritable. Fakir couldn't help grimacing at the unintentional irony of her words. "I mean, I returned your heart, right, so how am I still human? I don't still have the pendant, do I?" she added, tugging at the neck of her hospital gown with a weak hand, her fingers catching against a pale gold chain circling her throat. She tried to sit forward, craning her neck in an attempt to peer at the stone lying against her collarbone.

"It's different," she remarked, surprised, her fingers trying to hold up the stone. It was smooth, and warm to the touch, a small egg-shaped jewel, suspended from the chain from the narrower end. Was it a trick of the light, or did it swirl with two different shades of red within? Wishing to get a better look at it, Duck tried to raise her body further even as it ached and the effort left her feeling faint and dizzy.

"Here, stop that," Fakir chided, annoyance masking the worry in his voice; he caught her other hand with his own and helped her ease back onto the pillows. "Weren't you listening when I said you lost a lot of blood and shouldn't move around so much yet?"

"What happened? Why did it change?" she insisted once she had caught her breath again.

Fakir knew that Duck was nothing if not determined; there would be no getting her to rest until she had the answers she wanted.

"I offered you my heart. Do you understand what that means?" Despite Duck's easy assurance that she remembered everything, her question earlier had raised doubts in him that he could not so easily lay to rest.

She pulled her thoughts away from the pendant around her neck, and turned her head to the side to look up at Fakir; a light blush covered his cheekbones and his eyes refused to meet hers. "W-well, now I do!" she stuttered out—it was only after she had offered her own heart that she realized what it meant to give it to someone. She studied his profile a long moment as he still did not respond, "Y-you love me?"

"Do you even have to ask," he muttered, still without looking at her, as if seeing would be disbelieving and this entire wonderful dream would unravel before his eyes, "after all this?" A pause, and then "When you offered me your heart, is that what you also meant?"

"Well, yes, what else could I have meant by it?" Duck couldn't help being both a touch exasperated and a touch amused at his question. How dense did Fakir think she _was_?

"Then, I think that's why you're human." He had started calmly and logically enough, but by the end he could not continue sitting beside her, under her gaze in his embarrassment. Rising, he walked to window across from her bed, looking out into the setting sun, his back to her. "The other pendant was made of my humanity, but this one, I think, is made of a piece of our love for each other."

"Then it's because of you," she said, "that I'm human again." Turning away from the sunset, its light still in his eyes, he faced her, crossed the room and returned to her side at the softness in her voice.

Pushing aside all embarrassment—it paled in the face of having almost lost her and seeing her now so weak—he sat on the edge of the bed, and gently, so gently embraced her, holding her close, holding her as tightly as he dared. "And it's because of you," he whispered into her hair, "that I'm human again. I had forgotten how much light there is in this world until you gave it back to me."_ (2)_

* * *

By the time Rue admitted to herself that there was no hope of finding any of the others by wandering the town on her own any further, it was late afternoon. How could she possibly do nothing but sit around and _wait_ without driving herself to distraction?

Leaving a note on her own door and Duck's to look for her in the practice rooms, Rue headed toward the ballet buildings, hoping to dance out some of her frustrations, the two fledgling ravens that had been trailing her throughout her search still accompanying her.

She slipped on her claret colored toe shoes, stretched, and then went through the basics again and again. At last, she pushed herself into more and more ambitious poses, all the while the fledgling ravens fluttered, careful not to hamper her movements and she wondered bemused if she was forever doomed to be the princess of ravens. Even if she had changed her fate, there was still that darkness in her. But soon, that and all other thoughts slipped from her mind, as she threw herself and every emotion she had not dared express over the past months into her dance, surrendered herself to it.

* * *

It was the most terrifyingly beautiful thing Autor had ever seen. All satin and porcelain and night. And he wondered, when she stopped, if he would see Princess Kraehe; but the moment passed and when she drew to a halt, breathing hard, the look in her eyes and the small smile of recognition on her face were entirely human.

"I thought I would find you here," Autor said.

Rue tilted her head in acknowledgment.

"If the world were ending," he asked her conversationally, "and there was nothing you could do to stop it, how would you go out of it?"

Rue did not even have to think for the answer. For all the uncertainties she had, there were some truths that existed beyond doubt. "Dancing, with my prince." And it was then that she realized she needed both, not simply one or the other to be happy. "But the world is not ending," she added resolutely. She wouldn't let it, not this way.

"Would you mind, then, since the world is not ending" Autor asked adjusting his glasses, "if I accompanied you?"

"You dance?"

"In my own fashion," a self-deprecating smile flashed across his face as he adjusted the bench at the piano by the windows and then struck a chord.

And so Rue danced, her movements changing to fit the music and the music changing to fit her movements. His fingers almost stumbled over the keys in some places, eyes on Rue as she arched so gracefully, the ravens around her like traces of her motion, time caught in space. The lilting music, so full of life, slowed and then, one tinkling key at a time faded into nothingness. The fledgling ravens which had been caught up in the music and the dance settled now with ruffled feathers on the floor and raised a raucous cawing.

Rue, surprised at the sudden halt, turned to ask Autor why he had stopped. An elegant statue seated at the piano stool, hands upraised over keys, looked back at her. Unable to believe her eyes, she stepped towards him, reached out to brush one, warm living finger against his marble hands.

Mythos found her thus, staring horrified and disbelieving at the marble statue of a boy perched on a piano stool, ravens around her, and another cupped in his own hands.

* * *

_(1) Based on the Celtic legend of Tam Lin._

_(2) Adapted from my favorite line from Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earth Sea, "For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me."_


	15. Chapter 15

_Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen who wanted a child more than any treasure in the world. But when a prince was at last born to the aging couple, they learned that his fate would be to protect all weak things even at the cost of his life. _

_The king and queen mourned, for with such a fate their prince would come to know nothing but sorrow and pain. And so, thinking to save him from grief and bequeath him nothing but unending happiness, they banished all shadows from their kingdom. _

_"Ah, peace forever," they sighed, watching despair and anger and darkness fly out from the prince's heart, from their hearts, from the hearts of all their subjects in the form of ravens. But where will they fly to? the king and queen wondered before forgetting the question in the shining smile of their son, his heart now untouched and pure as freshly fallen snow._

_But did the Monster Raven, so entirely evil, come out from the prince's heart or did the prince, so impossibly pure, come out from the raven's?_

* * *

Fakir set the well-worn book down in his lap with a sigh, leaning back as much as he could in the hard, wooden hospital chair beside Duck's bed. It was the same book Charon had read to Fakir countless times when he had been a child, the same book Fakir himself had read to the heartless Mythos countless times, the same book he had turned to in hopes of finding an answer when they had realized that they had been caught in the thrall of Drosselmeyer's story all along only to discover it had never had an ending at all, and somehow, none of them had noticed. He had spent so much time desperately searching for endings then that he had never given much thought to the beginning of The Prince and the Raven.

Long before the prince shattered his heart to seal the raven, his heart had been shattered and a raven as evil as the prince was noble and pure had flown out from it. It was an absurd sort of question that the story posed, and now knowing something of Drosselmeyer's twisted sense of humor firsthand, very much in keeping with the taste of the writer: Was the prince a part of the raven or the raven a part of the prince?

In a way, it hardly mattered; they were different faces of the same coin and so vied for mastery. The raven wanted nothing more than to devour the prince and when that failed, to change him into a prince who would love a raven, a prince who was a raven. In the end, the raven himself was devoured in the warm red glow that emanated from the prince's sword, a flash of red light that glowed like the prince's own heart. But what of those ravens, what of that prince now?

As if summoned by this thought, Mythos quietly entered the hospital room, a stack of books in his arms. "I thought I would bring you some of the books you wanted to check before Rue and I continued our search."

Fakir had been reluctant to leave Duck by herself, even though she only woke infrequently and would not notice his absence, as if once out of his sight she might vanish, and at last Mythos had decided that he and Rue would search the town for more statues and ravens while Fakir worked to learn just what was afoot.

"Any luck in uncovering what we're facing?"

Fakir rose, taking the books from Mythos and setting them carefully on the floor beside his chair. He motioned the other boy to follow him to the corridor just outside the room so their conversation would not disturb the sleeping Duck. "Mythos, you said you sensed a raven and that is why you returned to Goldcrown...what did you mean by it?"

"Even in my kingdom I could feel the poison stirring, a darkness in the air, the restlessness of raven blood. Ever since we returned to my kingdom, I have felt the pull of the raven within me, a shadow over my heart; I tried to suppress it as best as I could, to bury those dark emotions, but it grew stronger and after a time I realized it was starting to call to me not from within myself or within the kingdom but from without."

"So, there was something awakening in Goldcrown Town that felt familiar to you?"

"As familiar as this raven's blood that now flows in my veins." Mythos closed his eyes momentarily, as if in pain. "When I feared you were the Raven and raised my sword against you, when you were in despair and begged me to raise my sword against you, I was torn, not knowing if my desires were my own or from the raven's blood within me."

"Once I knew, without thinking," Mythos continued wistfully, "what I should do: protect the weak even when it endangered my own wellbeing. Even when I was heartless, I knew this to the marrow of my bones. But now I am never certain what it means to protect the weak, if what I do does in fact protect the weak. The Raven in me now has riddled me with doubt."

"I've been reading _The Prince and the Raven_ again," Fakir said in a gentle voice, "and Mythos, I think the Raven was always supposed to be a part of your heart, that the story itself was set into motion because the Raven was torn out of it."

Mythos stared at his most loyal knight, his eyes haunted, "This darkness then," he asked in an undertone, "is, has always been, all my own?"

There was no response that Fakir could think of that would be adequate in the face of Mythos' pain and so he merely clasped his prince's shoulder with a hand. It was an agony Fakir had learned too well himself; the Darkest Knight was as much a part of him as the Raven was a part of Mythos.

A moment, and then Mythos seemed to visibly pull himself together. Given the large number of statues he had Rue had already discovered, there was no time to indulge in his own personal grief. "And these fledgling ravens?"

"I think they're also from the fairytale. What they're doing in the hearts of the townspeople, I don't know, but we have to find a way to return them. That's all I know with any certainty so far," Fakir sighed, rubbing his weary eyes and refusing to think about how desperately he wanted sleep, how much he wished never to see another book again after what felt like endless, fruitless hours of searching them.

And now it was Mythos' turn to clasp Fakir's shoulder. "I have full faith in you as my knight."

"We'll find a way," Fakir agreed grimly. He glanced back into Duck's hospital room, watching her sleep peacefully: he would not lose her again. "We have to." And then, almost against his own will, he inquired, "Has she cooled down any?"

"Give Rue time, she is very protective of those she cares for." Fakir did not see the faint smile on Mythos lips. "A little like you."

Fakir scowled. "It doesn't matter to me, but it bothers Duck."

"And so it matters to you after all," Mythos smiled again. "Give her time. I had best return to our search."

Fakir merely sighed again. It had been a mess the day before.

* * *

Things had begun normally enough, or as normally as they could be given the situation. Mythos had rushed Rue to the hospital. At first she had still been too stunned by what she had seen happen to Autor to inquire, but when she had roused herself enough from her shock to ask why Duck was in the hospital, Mythos had insisted that they had more pressing matters to discuss first. Duck had smiled reassuringly at Rue as she leaned back into the pillows that propped her up, but that had hardly eased Rue's concern. She had perched on the bed beside the smaller girl, worry lining her face as she looked at Duck while Mythos explained what he had found by the lakeside—not only the fledgling raven he had expected, but the statue of a girl in the place of a living, breathing one.

And Rue, who had unearthed the greatest part of the mystery explained not only what she and Autor had discovered but about the defacement of the manuscript itself. "...he was not sure how it would work, but Autor theorized that the gaps, 'lacunae' he called them, he created in the story were enacted by the most convenient players from the story itself."

"So I became a puppet in my own story," Fakir had uttered in tones of self-disgust, pacing along the room in his agitation. "That bastard."

"Surely the story has wreaked more than enough vengeance on him," Mythos suggested quietly.

"There has to be a way to turn him, all of them human again, doesn't there?" Duck asked, worry and fatigue clear in her voice. The only thing that kept Fakir from suggesting that she rest was the certain knowledge that she would refuse and the ensuing quarrel would only sap her strength further.

"First we need to learn just who is being affected and why—so far we know of Autor, the Bookmen, and that girl Mythos found," Rue counted the figures on her fingers. "And what, if anything, this all might have to do with those thankless feathered nuisances I've been taking care of in your absence, Duck."

Fakir had spoken then, uncharacteristically hesitant, "I don't think I created them—I think the ravens were already in the townsfolk's—my victims'" he amended with self-loathing, "hearts."

"But I can't think that they belong there," Mythos had frowned in thought. "When I found Charon, the fledgling raven with him was like a burden too heavy for him to bear, a despair not his own. Still, I don't think they mean any harm."

Duck had nodded her agreement with that and Rue after a day in the company of the birds had to agree as well.

"I don't think the two—the statues and the birds—are related, or at least not directly." Fakir reasoned. "There were no ravens with the Bookmen or with Autor?" he asked and when Rue nodded, continued, "There may still be ravens trapped in their hearts but the absence suggests that the birds don't have anything to do with them turning to stone."

After that point, the conversation had started to go in circles and Duck, unable to keep her eyes open any longer, had dozed lightly, drifting in and out of their talk as they covered the same ground, unable to progress further without more information. All they could do for now, they realized in the end, was catalogue who had turned to stone and gather as many of the fledgling ravens they could find and see if anything in the library would shed more light on the situation.

It was then that Rue, whose concern had been mounting for some time now as she learned just how weak and injured Duck was, had demanded in an angry whisper, not wanting to wake the other girl, "Now will one of you tell me just what is going on? Why is Duck in the hospital?"

A silence that stretched too long and then both Mythos and Fakir spoke at once.

"It was an accident," Mythos insisted even as Fakir confessed in an emotionless voice, "It's because of me. It's my fault."

Rue pursed her lips. "It's one or the other," she had snapped back when no explanations followed, her gaze already hardening as she considered Fakir's words.

Before Fakir, in the throes of his guilt, could make matters worse by telling as unflattering a tale as possible Mythos set forth as neutral an account of events as he could.

Mythos had barely finished before Rue was on her feet, "You—"

"Keep your voice down," Fakir had bit out quietly, "or do you _want_ to wake her?"

"Both of you calm down," Mythos had tried to interject. "We don't have time for this now. I will go look for more statues and Rue can stay and take care of the ravens—"

At that, her patience a thread frayed by worry for Duck, for Mythos, for them all, to the point of breaking, Rue had rounded on Mythos, "Do you have any idea how furious I am with you for the way you keep going into danger alone since we have returned here, and leaving me behind to worry and wait? But that's a conversation we will have in more detail _later,_" she promised. She was filled with an anger so cleansing that all fear of showing the ugliness of her heart to Mythos had been burned away. The anger that he would keep her from keeping him safe entirely surpassed the fear that he would reject her when he learned just what a dark, flawed princess he had chosen. "Be certain that I am going with you this time. We can both check in on the ravens as we need to."

Mythos was taken aback, seeing a fire in Rue's eyes that he hadn't realized had been missing until then and then wondered how he could possibly have not noticed—without it she was only half alive. It was as if she had worked so hard to erase the memory of Princess Kraehe from his mind by becoming her exact opposite while they dwelt in the fairytale kingdom that, in a way, he had begun to lose sight of all Rue truly was. She would not budge on this, he realized, the Rue he knew would not give an inch.

"Then...we will search the town together," Mythos had agreed slowly, still caught off guard, not by that display of Rue's temper, but by how he had failed to notice that something had been amiss with her until this moment, "while you, Fakir, stay here with Tutu and see if you can find anything that will help us in the library."

"I'm not leaving her alone with him," Rue had whispered fiercely, looking over at Duck whose face was still unnaturally pale under her tan, "not after what he's done to her!"

And that was when things had really fallen apart. Already a mass of seething guilt, remorse, and self-loathing, Fakir had lashed out, "And just what did you do to her as Kraehe, to Mythos?"

"Fakir!"

The sharpness of Mythos' raised voice had woken Duck and she had taken in the tense scene before her with startled eyes.

Mythos' rebuke had shocked Fakir; he had never before heard that tone from the prince before. It had at once filled him with shame and he'd smoldered, full of unspoken apologies—not for Rue, but for Mythos. And yet the shame did not dissipate the anger; he'd seethed with fury directed against himself, directed against Rue.

"Wha—what's wrong?" Duck asked, a little blearily.

"Duck," Rue said, taking the other girl's hands in her own, "I'm worried about you—I heard what happened by the lake. I want you to feel safe, to _be_ safe and I don't think it's a good idea to leave you here with Fakir." She added grudgingly, "even if it was an accident."

Duck had smiled into the older girl's troubled eyes, "I'm glad you're worried about me Rue—well I'm not glad that you're worried, but you know," Duck rambled in her usual way, "anyway, what I mean is, it'll be ok. I trust Fakir."

The furrow of anxiety creased in Rue's brow remained. "Why?"

"Because he's Fakir," Duck answered with a slightly red face, but looking Rue in the eye, had continued softly, "because I love him."

Rue had sat back stunned at that; and while Mythos had begun to suspect the direction of Fakir's feelings over the past few days, he too had been taken by surprise. For his part, Fakir had been just as stunned although Duck had admitted as much to him the day before. The anger that Mythos' rebuke had not been able to quell evaporated, replaced by an embarrassment he could not hope to speak through.

"....I see," Rue had responded at last as she rose from Duck's side, still unsure of what to think. Part of Rue had wanted to point out that there was no logic to that at all. But she didn't have the heart to do it, not when she knew what Duck really meant. She herself had loved Mythos just as truly when he had been cruel and vicious, tainted with raven's blood. And Mythos had loved her even though she had been the one to do that to him. Rue couldn't help but admit, if only to herself, the truth in Fakir's stinging words. They had, both of them, hurt the people they loved, and so perhaps it was not her place to judge him.

But Duck was her first friend, her dearest friend, and so even as she stalked out of the room, the Raven Princess had promised Fakir, "If you ever hurt her again, I'll make you pay."

Fakir had wondered a little sardonically if he should have made a similar promise to her.

* * *

Fakir returned to the chair beside Duck's bed, wincing again as he remembered again the look of anger mixed with betrayal in Mythos' voice when Fakir had lashed out at Rue. It was not a moment he was proud of.

"If you keep frowning like that, your eyebrows will get stuck together," Duck teased, her voice rough from sleep.

He couldn't help but smile softly at that, able to forget his guilt about the argument and even all the dilemmas surrounding them in that moment with her. "I'll see a nurse about getting a meal for you," he said as he helped her sit up.

Fakir had discovered to his surprise, over the past few days that Duck made a terrible invalid. She complained about the bland food, resisted help at every turn, and insisted that she was well enough to leave even when it was clear she wasn't.

Her very first meal, when Fakir had to help feed her had been a disaster; she had alternately scowled and pouted, telling him she could manage on her own even as lifting her arm tired her. At last, an exasperated Fakir had thrown the spoon down angrily and exclaimed, "Haven't you ever been sick before?! Now stop making faces and just let me take care of you!"

She had muttered something under her breath.

"What was that?" he'd growled, utterly at the end of his patience.

And that had triggered Duck's own temper. "I said, 'No, I've never been sick!' Not as a girl, and I don't think as a duck and besides other ducks don't take care of you like that so I'm sorry if I'm doing it wrong but I don't want to be a burden for you and this just makes me feel so completely stupid to not be able to do anything for myself and I'm tired all the time and hurt all over, so just leave me alone!"

"Moron," Fakir said, which was somehow supposed to mean _You could never be a burden to me_. "Idiot," he had added for good measure, not sure if he was insulting her or himself anymore. Both probably. And then had sat down again and picked up the spoon, glowering until Duck had opened her mouth resentfully, a scowl on her own face and he had not been able to stop a laugh at her expression.

As he set down the tray of soup, soft bread, and cheese, even though she was now truly well enough to feed herself, Fakir couldn't resist teasing Duck a little by holding out a spoonful of soup before her.

She glared, "I bet you're even worse at being sick than I am, and when it happens, I'll be there to rub it in your face."

He would never admit it, and wondered at his own irrationality at the thought, but a part of him was looking forward to seeing that too.

She ate in silence for a few moments and he turned once more to the perpetual stack of books beside him, wishing for Autor's help even as he cursed the other boy's name, although he knew full well that no matter how much he cursed Autor, all the blame for what had transpired lay squarely on his own shoulders—it hadn't been Autor who had wielded a sword against Mythos, who had hurt Duck or Charon or the others, but Fakir himself.

"Do you think," Duck mused around a mouthful of bread, "that Princess Tutu might be able to do anything about all this?"

Fakir looked up from the book in his lap as he considered Duck's question. "We don't even know if this new pendant has the power to transform you into Princess Tutu, but in any case, it doesn't matter," he added repressively. "You're in no shape to be going around dancing."

"But maybe as Tutu I can help the people who've turned to stone."

"No."

"But Fakir—"

"Your health matters more."

"You're one to talk!"

"I'm not the one in the hospital bed!"

"You will be soon if you keep this up," Duck snapped back, anger clear in her voice. "When was the last time you slept? You look like you're going to collapse! How will that help anyone?"

They glared at each other, at an impasse until Fakir sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, "You may have a point there, but we're so pressed for time." And yet had gone so long without resting that merely the suggestion of sleep was too great a temptation to resist. The words had started to blur again before his eyes and he found himself reading the same sentences over and over before being able to understand them. "Maybe this useless book will actually make sense after a little rest," he admitted reluctantly, setting the book down and pillowing his head on his arms on the side of her bed.

Duck watched as the tense line of his shoulders gradually relaxed; when his breathing became soft and even, she knew he had fallen asleep and felt relieved to see him resting at last. She knew Fakir blamed himself for the situation they were in now and was pushing himself to his limits to find a solution. Even though they were all in this together, he was trying to shoulder the burden on his own.

A gentle knock on the door roused Duck from her thoughts. She looked up to find Mythos, yet another stack of books in his arms.

"Where's Rue?" Duck whispered, gesturing to the sleeping Fakir to indicate they keep their voices down.

"She's feeding the fledgling ravens." He set the stack down quietly and picked up a blanket lying at the foot of Duck's bed. As Mythos draped it over Fakir's shoulders he murmured, "He drives himself too harshly."

"I don't think he really believes we're in this together, that he doesn't need to do everything alone," she sighed. "Mythos," Duck asked, her eyes on Fakir's haggard face, "do you think you could help me to the lake—I want to see if there's anything I can do for Pique."

Had she been anyone but Princess Tutu, Mythos would have hesitated, for it was only a handful of days since she had been so seriously injured. But seeing the earnest concern and determination in her expression, he acquiesced.

* * *

Mythos began to doubt the wisdom of their plan as he helped Duck walk to the lakeside, her arm slung across his shoulders—he was supporting much of her weight—but it seemed foolish to turn back now.

Duck felt exhausted with each step, as if the grim overcast sky was pressing down on her. When she at last caught sight of Pique, a marble statue leaning against the tree Duck had left her by, she let out a little cry of distress, "Oh, Pique!"

She couldn't bear to see Pique like this; Duck stepped away from Mythos' supporting shoulder, reaching out her arms to her friend, light sparkling in the pendant about her neck, her heartsblood within the stone answering the call of her heart. She felt warmth well up within her, giving her strength and washing away the weariness in her limbs, and suddenly she was Princess Tutu, the princess she had called out from within her own heart, the bird-like princess who had wings in place of arms and possessed enough hope to lighten the darkest despair.

She danced, reaching out to the girl who was frozen in stone with feathered arms and hoping to call out to her heart.

_Who are you?_ Pique's scared voice whispered in Princess Tutu's mind although the expression on the statue's face stayed set in stone and unmoving. _It's dark and lonely here._

"Pique? Where are you?" And suddenly, Princess Tutu found herself in a void—all blackness and emptiness with Pique huddled and miserable at the center of it.

"What's wrong?" Princess Tutu asked her gently.

"I can't move," Pique cried into her knees. "I don't know how to go on."

Tutu rested the tips of her wings on Pique's shoulders and helped the other girl rise, leading her into a pirouette.

"I can't remember who I am," the pink-haired girl confessed as she and Tutu spun about each other. "There are so many things, so many people I can't remember that I'm trapped, I can't move forward."

"It hurts, doesn't it," Tutu answered, "not to remember your past, knowing you've forgotten people you loved and all the things you experienced together. But all the memories, they are right there, in your heart." Tutu brought her winged arms up to her own heart, and remembered how the Oak Tree had awakened memories so deeply asleep within herself that she could not have reached them alone.

"Remember," she implored Pique and the egg-shaped pendant glowing a richer red with Duck's wish flared, the light surrounding them both. "You are a girl who loves ballet, a good friend, and so much more" and memories washed around Pique of herself and two girls sitting by a fountain and laughing happily, of afternoons spent reading romance novels secretly, of dreams of a dark handsome prince who would sweep her off her feet, of a practice room and the same two girls with her being scolded by a feline instructor, of a raven prince who reached out to her and told her to love only him, a town full of ravens, of a princess glowing with hope who had saved them all. All the memories she had lost since the story had ended returned to her. Half of them seemed fantastical dreams to her, but if they were fantasies, they were all her own and she grasped them desperately not wanting to lose them again.

Pique looked up to find a large white swan before her, brightening the void that surrounded her. She stepped towards the bird, and it guided her out of the darkness.

* * *

As he watched Tutu fall to her knees with weariness, the awareness of her human frailty struck Mythos like a blow. When he, heartless and hopeless, had first met Tutu, he could do nothing but worry about her with each returned heartshard because she was such a fragile hope, the first he had seen in so long. But as the raven's blood saturated his own, she had taken on more and more the form of an unyielding enemy, one he could not destroy. In that final battle against the Raven, the power of her hope had so outshone the mortality of her body that he had not been able to think of her any other way. He had not realized that until this moment, he still thought of her as the magical princess whose hope nothing could extinguish. And she was still that, still a magical princess of infinite hope, but also human and vulnerable.

He caught her before she could fall. "I—I'm all right," Duck breathed, her transformation undoing itself. "How's Pique?"

"She looks to be asleep, but entirely human once more," he assured her. "I will return for her after helping you to the hospital," he promised as he carried her back to the town.

Mythos looked down at the unconscious girl in his arms, her face lined with pain and exhaustion. "I have relied on you so heavily for so long, that I had forgotten you are much more than a princess who will come to aid me when I am in need. Forgive me, Tutu—Duck."


	16. Chapter 16

_Once upon a time, a weaver from the court of heaven disobeyed the law of the Jade Emperor by falling in love with a mortal cowherd and abandoning her skyloom halfwoven with colorful clouds to be with her human lover. _

_Yet she could not help missing the courts of heaven and would return secretly to work her cloudweavings and so it happened that one day the Jade Emperor discovered her treachery. Furious, he drew a river of stars between heaven and earth to keep the lovers apart, trapping the celestial weaver on one bank of the Milky Way and the lowly cowherd on the other._

_But seeing their unending tears, all the birds in the world took pity on the brokenhearted lovers and bridged the banks of that starry river so they could meet, even if only for that moment on borrowed wings. (1)_

* * *

Fakir stirred drowsily, his sleep-heavy eyes opening to the white sheets on Duck's bed. He stood, stretching his back and shoulders gratefully, tired still but feeling more refreshed, more clear-headed than before. _Even Duck can be right sometimes_, he mused turning back to look down at the sleeping girl and finding only an empty bed and rumpled sheets.

For one unreal moment, he wished he were dreaming, caught only in a terrible nightmare where he had woken to find his worst fears realized: he had merely closed his eyes and Duck had vanished as if she had been nothing more than light all along, forever beyond his reach. But this was no passing nightmare, he knew, but a terrible and inescapable reality.

He tried to calm his sudden panic, by reassuring himself that perhaps a nurse had come to help her to the bathroom, thought of any number of other mundane scenarios, but as the minutes passed and she did not return, he felt panic bloom in his chest. It was the memory of her wondering if Princess Tutu could help the cursed townsfolk that made his blood run cold. Surely she wouldn't try something so dangerous when she was so far from recovering. The doctor had not minced words—if she did not take her recovery seriously, Duck was in very real danger of risking and perhaps losing her life.

And in the end, it did not matter how or why she had vanished, whether it was in a flash of light or to help the townsfolk. She was gone and there was only one thing that could mean. He roused himself enough from the paralyzing fear to move, knocking over his chair in his careless haste, thinking desperately to search for her without knowing where he could possibly begin.

In that moment, Mythos entered, a slowly awakening Duck in his arms.

"Mythos!" Surprise and anger suffused his voice at the other boy's carelessness and for a strange, disorienting moment he felt as if he were transported back in time, scolding a heartless Mythos for risking his life for foolish trifles, or threatening Princess Tutu when she would not leave well enough alone and insisted on hazarding Mythos' life and the story once more. It was a curiously similar fury, a familiar fear of losing someone else he held so dear, that welled up within him now. "She's hardly recovered! How could you think to—"

"Wait, Fakir," Duck began in a tired voice, "I was the one who asked him—"

His fear could not be turned aside so lightly and he snapped back, "That doesn't mean he should have! If you don't have the sense to realize it that doesn't mean _he_—" But on turning back to Mythos and seeing the torn look in the prince's eyes, Fakir could not find it in himself to continue. No, this was not the same Mythos Fakir had cared for and struggled to protect throughout out his childhood; this was not the same hapless, heartless prince Fakir had tried to control in order to save him from himself but a prince forced to make decisions that were lined with sorrow no matter what choice he made.

"Forgive me, Duck, Fakir. It was ill done of me." Mythos eased Duck down onto the bed, and although he faced them both, his gaze and his thoughts seemed to be directed inward. "When I was heartless, at least I endangered only myself in my thoughtlessness, but now...worrying for the townsfolk, I did not think to worry for Duck as well. It is a heavy burden, having a heart."

"Yes," Fakir said, having once given up his own because it had become unbearable. Fakir's anger drained, leaving an emptiness, a hollow feeling in its wake and he wondered why he had opened his heart again when he already knew that loving was so taxing, so painful, always so fraught with the threat of loss.

"There is nothing for you to apologize for, Mythos," Duck insisted. "I asked you to help me to the lake."

Duck's casual dismissal of the danger she had put herself made Fakir's cooling temper flare once more. Sitting down beside her on the edge of the bed, he demanded, his voice harsh with worry, but the hands on her shoulders gentle, hesitant. "Are you an idiot? Don't you understand you can't go prancing around like that unless you _want_ to endanger—"

And that, of course, set Duck off. "_You're_ the one who doesn't understand! You don't understand _anything at all_!" Duck repeated with righteous fury, forgetting Mythos, forgetting her weariness in the anger that surged through her at Fakir's stubborn determination to continue as he had started: alone.

"You've no right to lecture me about my health and safety when you never care or worry about yourself!" she answered heatedly, tears in her eyes from remembered worry even as she yelled at him. Somehow, after the first few words had come tumbling out, she could not stop the rest. "Who's the one who took out his heart and practically killed himself? You're probably planning on doing something just as dumb all by yourself without telling me!"

"Oh, but it's all right for you to run off by yourself and do just that—"

But Duck was too angry to let him even get a word in edgewise. "I wasn't alone! I went with Mythos and I _told_ you I was worried about Pique and the others and I wanted to see if I could at least help her and you wouldn't listen. And I'm worried about you too! You keep thinking you have to do this all by yourself! Mythos and Rue are looking for statues but you think that it's up to you to find the answer all alone."

"It's a mess I created and one I'll fix, so stay out of it." Fakir's expression shuttered and he turned away. Of course, Duck was not one to take a hint and ignored his clear dismissal of the topic and Fakir realized that this was nothing at all like dealing with a recalcitrant, heartless Mythos.

"Don't you understand that it doesn't work that way? Why are you so, so _pig-headed_?!" Duck exclaimed, exasperation clear in every line of her body.

At this, Fakir snapped back, "You're a fine one to talk about working together! Running off on your own when you're in no condition for it!"

"Because you wouldn't _listen_! I can't just sit by while this is happening—why can't we work together to fix this like we did last time?"

They had been arguing so intensely, their faces merely inches apart, that she could see the moment all the fight went out of him and he said with a weariness that saddened her, "Because this time, it's all my fault."

She practically pulled her hair in frustration at that. "Fakir, it's not your fault there were ravens already in people's hearts. It's not your fault they turned to stone. It's not your fault I returned only a piece of your heart to you."

And then suddenly, all the pieces fell into place for Duck.

"It's not your fault I went back to being a duck and started losing myself."

He sighed, closing his eyes and wondered how she had seen to the heart of his fear, but then, he knew despite his own claim just now, she was and always would be Princess Tutu. She leaned forward, closing those few inches between them. Duck could see him hurting and without even thinking about what she was doing, she kissed him, tenderly pressing her lips against his in an impulsive gesture of love and comfort, so simple and heartfelt that she even forgot to be embarrassed.

"I chose to do it," she added softly. "You can't make my choices for me and you can't hold yourself responsible for them."

"When I woke and you were gone, I thought...Just because you were Princess Tutu once doesn't mean it's your job to save us all. You'll only get yourself hurt and I'll lose you," and the word _again_ hung in the air between them, unspoken and yet almost palpable. And because he could not bear exposing so much emotion, Fakir drew back from that too vulnerable admission, and instead, refusing to meet her eyes, said, "I just want to keep you safe." It was just as true, just as much preying on his mind, and yet nowhere nearly as raw a confession.

She cupped his face gently in her hands, forcing him to look at her as she told him the truth he would not face otherwise, "If that means you won't listen to me, won't let me live my life, then like today, we'll always be acting alone, even if we are together."

"Promise me, then," Fakir insisted, as stubborn as ever, his arms encircling her and holding her close. "Promise me you'll be more careful in the future. What you did today was incredibly dangerous and stupid."

She smiled nestling in the warmth of his embrace, "As long as you do the same _and_ promise to be less of a pig-headed jerk."

Neither noticed the eerie silence that had overtaken the building.

* * *

Mythos slipped away when he had realized after the first few insults that the argument wasn't about him at all. He had felt such an intruder and yet invisible, all at once, as Duck and Fakir tore into each other. Wryly, he wondered if either had even noticed his absence.

Such frivolous thoughts left him as he walked through the town and caught sight of a statue here at a street corner, there before a storefront. Already there were several more than there had been merely an hour ago. The story's curse was spreading. He had seen firsthand how much helping only one person had drained Duck: weak as she still was, how could they possibly turn back so many others?

After returning to the lake, rousing Pique and then helping the disoriented girl back to the dormitory, he stood in front of the building but did not catch sight of Rue at her still curtain-less window.

Picking up a pebble, he tossed it at her window, the light gravel tapping against the glass. A shadow moved within and then the casement opened, and Rue, gingerly setting down a jar on the window ledge, leaned out.

Despite the gravity of the situation they were in, something within him smiled to see his usually elegant Rue looking petulant at the thought of having to feed the fledgling ravens their disgusting meal once more. "Shall I serenade you, my lady, or will you take pity on your poor swain and come down?"

He could see her smile at his gently teasing flirtation even from this distance, and again he wondered how he had not noticed its absence for days, perhaps weeks, when she had been right beside him. "Oh, I will gladly come down if you will handle the rest of this," she answered indicating the jar. Despite the lighthearted ease of her words, he could not help thinking that Rue was avoiding him, as if did not wish to look into his eyes for fear of what she would find there, or not.

When she joined him a few moments later, a small flock of nestlings about her, she handed him the jar distastefully. As Mythos continued the task, careful of his fingers, Rue remarked, "Really, they should do their own foraging by now. At this point, I think we're just spoiling them."

Mythos smiled, and yet could not help but feel the uneasiness that hovered between them still and seemed to shadow every word spoken between them. They had decided the day before that the only way to cover so much ground so quickly would be to split up and at that time, that decision had been easier to make because neither wanted to face immediately the shadows that lay between them.

"We never did have that promised conversation, everything has been so chaotic" he remarked at last.

She nodded her agreement, but then said, "There is nothing left for me to say. You know how I feel."

A raven nipped his hand at his inattentiveness, but Mythos did not feel that pain. "You have been unhappy."

Only now did she have the strength to confess what she had always known but had been too afraid to admit, even to herself, until coming back to Goldcrown. Duck, Autor, this place, had all brought back to her the Rue she had been here, the Rue she had so desperately tried to lose for the sake of his love. "Part of me will always be Princess Kraehe—so uncertain of myself, jealous of your regard, and always fearful of losing your love." Reaching out for his scratched hand and cradling it in hers, she asked without meeting his eyes, "Can you love me still?"

"When the raven's blood raged within me, you were nothing to me," Mythos said at last, and Rue felt her heart crumble. She had the answer she had sought—so much for Duck's idealistic nonsense about love and its strength. She had been raised as the Raven's daughter; she knew it was a frail, helpless thing in the face of unsavory truths, love. She released his hand.

But Mythos did not let her turn away from him, did not release the fingers that had let go of his. "At that time when I had lost myself almost entirely, if you were something I did not hate then you were nothing. And then you spoke, Rue, and summoned out of me what you had loved. And still I did not understand."_ (2)_

Her head was bowed still, her eyes shadowed. He knelt, still holding her hand, earnestness in his expression as he looked up into her eyes, the very picture of a fairytale prince before his princess. Yet his words were filled with more painful self-knowledge than any storybook prince's had ever been, "When I told you that the raven's blood probably remained within me just as it remained within you, and that it made me want to love you more than anyone else, I had thought that loving you was a flaw in me, the prince who was supposed to love everyone."

"And so," he continued, "I tried to return to who I thought I should be and bury that ravenous part of me that wants to follow its own desires. It was easier to do in the fairytale kingdom, where the only imperfect thing seemed to be my own heart." Rue started at that, hearing her own thoughts, her own tortured feelings coming from Mythos' lips.

"Only after encountering these fierce, helpless things," Mythos said, raising one hand to gesture at the ravens that continued to caw imperiously at being thus ignored, "did I begin to see that perhaps I was mistaken all along. In their beauty and their wildness, they were so like you, I could not bring myself to hurt them. I have been battling the Raven for so long, it has been my sworn enemy for so long, that I have forgotten that there is any way to face ravens but with a sword. And so I suppressed the desires of my raven's blood, raised my blade against my most loyal knight, and brought you sorrow."

She could see the apology in his eyes, but before it could make it to his lips—for the error had not been his alone—she reached out her free hand and brushed back his fair, feathery hair and spoke, "We have, both of us it seems, been so desperately trying to leave behind our shadows, to run from them even as they follow at our feet, that we lost sight of ourselves, of each other."

And then, because what she felt was too great to put into words, Rue answered lightly, hoping to ease a little the grimness of his expression, "I hope it's only beauty that you think I have in common these ravens. We certainly have different tastes, I assure you."

"Oh my princess," he answered with a wistful smile, taking the hand he held as he knelt before her still and bringing it to his lips, "I have not spoken with you like this for so long because I did not want to see the shape of my reflection in your eyes. I did not realize until now that in so doing I had made my heart a dead thing."

* * *

And yet, for all Mythos and Rue wished to talk longer, both knew that it was not a luxury the current situation would allow. Even before they left the Academy grounds, they were struck by the startling silence, the statues that dotted the grassy lawns of the campus like finely sculpted artwork. Students, a still-life. It was even more chilling when they reached the town square, which was crowded with dozens of statues. The most unnerving part was that the living did not seem to think anything was amiss, walking through the maze of marble sculptures as if they had always been there.

The curse was spreading, much faster than before and they had not yet found a way to stop it. Even the very air seemed darker, heavy with the promise of misfortune. They rushed to the hospital, only to find that all the staff had already turned to stone.

* * *

_(1) Based on the folklore of the Chinese Qixi festival._

_(2) One of my favorite lines from Patricia McKillip's The Book of Atrix Wolfe: "You were nothing to me. If you were something I did not hate, then you were nothing. And then you spoke, and summoned out of me what you had loved._


	17. Chapter 17

_Once upon a time, there was a sculptor so in love with beauty as a form, he spurned his lover and instead carved for himself a woman of ivory perfection. _

_But even though his desperate love at last gave life to the statue he loved more than life, her first step was away from him. She could not bear his heart of stone. (1) _

* * *

"At first," Mythos said, "it seemed to be only those who were directly affected by the misshapen story, those who faced the Darkest Knight, but now it seems it's spreading to the entire town, I think because all the townsfolk were in the backdrop of Drosselmeyer's original tale."

"We still don't know how to turn the townsfolk back into humans? Or why the curse of the story is turning them into statues?" Fakir demanded as soon as Rue and Mythos had finished informing them of the worsening situation.

"I think," Duck ventured, "I can help them as Princess Tutu."

"You can hardly dance with them all!" Rue and Fakir protested at the same time before glaring at each other.

"There must be some other way," Rue continued. "'The story was our only past, now we have no pasts, so we have no future,' that's what the Bookman said before he turned to stone," Rue mused.

Fakir glared at her accusingly. "And you didn't think to mention this earlier?"

"He was half mad with panic and fear," she snapped back, "Most of what he said was incoherent gibberish, do you want to hear all of that too?"

He opened his mouth, scathing response on his tongue, but before he could make the argument worse, Duck interrupted quietly, "We have to work _together_."

Fakir looked away, and admitted without looking in Rue's direction, "Sorry," he grumbled, more for Duck's sake than Rue's. "I'm not thinking straight." That she was as concerned about Duck's health made the grudging apology a little easier, but not by much.

Rue sighed, setting aside her own anger. "I wish Autor were here—I think he had a better idea of what was happening than any of us do."

"But you know, going back to what you just said," Duck ventured after a moment, "that sounds like what Pique said too. That she couldn't move because she couldn't remember who she was anymore." She paused, frowning in thought, "It all felt really familiar....just like when the Oak Tree awakened my memories."

Fakir's eyes widened in sudden realization. Abruptly he turned and strode out the door.

* * *

He ran through statue-lined streets, wishing he had thought of this much earlier. He had been going about it the wrong way from the start, looking in books—that was hardly his strong point. They had wasted so much time because of his mistake and now it might be too late. But regrets were worse than useless, he knew. All he could do was press forward and hope it would be enough. Fakir rushed toward the Oak Tree, toward the stone behind the museum Autor had shown him, what felt like a lifetime ago—it was the only place he could think of to seek for answers now.

As he placed his hand on the stone once more, he lost all sense of time, of place, and even of urgency and had to consciously remind himself to draw away from all the promise of endless stories that the Tree's very presence evoked in him.

"Ah, Spinner, you have returned," the memory of oak leaves sighed.

He forced his mind away from the stories that tugged and drew at him as he fell through the endless light of the Tree's being. "You know, don't you—your roots run through this entire place. What's happening to the town?"

"You wrote a story."

"It's not the revenge of the story on its characters?"

"No, not revenge, but the despair of forgotten memory. Stories remember the past and you wrote a story that erased the memory of it from those who lived it; but now even that last trace, that last recording of the past has vanished in smoke. If the story is forgotten, its characters too shall forget how to live."

"Then—to fix all this, I just need to write another story?"

"Only when a winged princess calls out of darkness to darkness, another from memory to memory, and a newborn story arises from the ashes of the old; only then will stone return to flesh, art to life."

The urgency that had been seeping out of Fakir in the face of the Tree's mesmerizing serenity returned to him in full force. "What use are mad prophecy and riddles?" he demanded, fear lacing his voice, for he could tell already just who the winged princess would have to be.

But the Tree merely repeated its words and he knew unless he drew back from it now, he would forget his purpose in the pull of the plots that surrounded him. It was drug and desire, the call to lose himself in the siren song of an infinite number of unspun stories. But even as one part of his mind tugged towards it another was entirely indifferent to its call. What did he care for that now? It would fall to Duck again to save them all, and thinking how small and pale she had looked in that hospital bed, he despaired for her.

* * *

"Rue," Duck fretted quietly, plucking at her blanket, and then unconsciously began to fidget with the pedant around her neck. "I'm worried. The first time Fakir almost lost who he is!"

Mythos, dozed uneasily in the chair by the bed. Rue had insisted he rest for there was no point in wearing themselves out now when they would certainly need all the strength they had to face the task before them. When he had resisted, Rue had scolded, and Duck had smiled to see the easy intimacy between them, happy that the wary anxiety she had seen her friend's eyes when she had first reappeared in Goldcrown Town was gone.

Duck had slyly teased the older girl about it when Mythos had left the room so Rue could help Duck change the bandages that still swathed her chest. Rue had pretended to be annoyed if only to distract herself from the worry that overcame her at seeing how Duck's recent exertions had caused the wound to bleed again a little.

Duck looked down at last at the egg-shaped stone in her fingers, and marveled again at how the two shades of red within it seemed to twine together, constantly moving, constantly changing but never parting. Really, it looked more like a bead of amber which had never hardened on the inside rather than a gem. "Isn't there any way I can go and make sure he's ok?"

Hearing the desperate concern in Duck's voice, a concern which Rue could understand all too well, the older girl relented at last, "Fine, but if we go, you will listen to me."

Rue forbade Duck to get up and instead hunted out a wheelchair from one of the hospital supply rooms. They made a curious progression through the statue-filled town, Mythos pushing Duck's chair while Rue walked at her side.

They found Fakir sitting listlessly before a stone in an empty field. He did not seem to be in the trance of the Tree, and even more worried at his stillness, Duck called out his name.

He turned at her voice, and seeing the worry and love in her eyes, he knew he would not be able to lie to her and save her from the knowledge that would surely doom her. He had made a promise.

* * *

"We need Autor to figure this out," Rue said at last in weary resignation. The words Fakir had repeated made almost no sense. All they could agree on was the identity of the winged princess but what exactly she was meant to do or how a story could rise from its ashes, escaped them.

"No." Fakir said savagely, "We're not risking her life for that piece of scum."

"Fakir, what did I say about letting me make my decisions! You promised!"

"And _you_ promised to be less stupid in the future."

"I hate to say this," Mythos said into their stalemate, "but I don't think we have much of a choice."

Fakir considered his prince a long moment in silence before asking evenly, "And are you putting their lives before hers again?"

And though Mythos did not flinch, Fakir could see the pain in his eyes despite the resolute set of his mouth.

"No, Fakir," Duck interrupted firmly. "I am."

"_Fool_." he spat out the word viciously and stalked away from the others, staring into the nothingness where only brief moments ago, there had been before him a massive tree made of endless light and the promise of unending stories. Why couldn't she see that her life was something so precious it was worth guarding and hoarding and keeping safe at all cost?

But Duck would not be moved. She had made her choice and now Fakir would have to make his. "Will you help me, Fakir, as you did before? Will you write me a story?"

And though there were still traces of anger in his voice, he answered without hesitating because he knew what Duck was really asking him was _Will we act together or alone?_

"Every story I will ever write is yours."

* * *

The four of them walked to the Academy in silence, Rue and Mythos lingering slightly behind to give the other two a little privacy. Both the Prince and Princess watched from a distance as Fakir pushed Duck's wheelchair, his head tilted slightly forward as he bent to catch her words.

"Do you not agree, my princess, that he truly loves her?" Mythos couldn't help asking Rue, wanting peace between his princess and his knight, "that he means her no harm?"

Rue merely sniffed dismissively in response, refusing to concede anything, but he did not miss how her gaze softened as it landed on the pair before them.

They parted ways at the library, Fakir to go to his carrel to begin a story and the other three to a practice room where a stone pianist played soundlessly. Fakir caught Mythos' eyes with his own, but it was on Rue that Fakir's gaze lingered as he demanded, as he begged, "Take care of her" and walked away, disregarding Duck's indignant protests that she could take care of herself just fine.

* * *

As Rue and Mythos stood to the side, Duck stepped out of the wheelchair and towards the marble figure at the piano, closing her eyes and calling out his name in her mind. The pendant's light washed over her, and Princess Tutu, the winged ballerina stood before the statue.

In the library, silence his only audience, Fakir lifted his quill, and wrote.

_Into darkness, Princess Tutu reached out a wing..._

She approached Autor en pointe, delicately stepping through the darkness to the boy hunched up in bitterness at the center of a darkened stage. Her body trembled faintly with fatigue, but she pushed such considerations out of her mind.

_The pendant, one heart linked to another, took her pain and weariness into itself..._ She could hear Fakir's words helping her, supporting her, as a danseur supported a ballerina so that together they wrought something otherwise impossible. The egg-shaped pendant flared and a warm, soothing light enveloped her, easing her aching, tired body and giving her the energy to continue.

"Autor?" she stood before the wretched boy who had not seen her, his head still bent. She curved one wing above her head, miming as she spoke, "Let's dance together."

Autor looked up at last, drawn away from inner demons and gazed at her in awe and disbelief. And although he had never wished to dance, never felt the impulse to do so before in his life—piano keys seemed to strike his own heartstrings and expressed so entirely any emotion he held—he somehow found himself rising, reaching for her outstretched wing.

"So, you are the duck who started it all," he said with wonder as he stepped forward. "Even with the wings, it's hard to believe." He cocked his head to the side as if listening to something far away, a music only he could hear "He's writing you a story even now, isn't he?"

Princess Tutu performed an arabesque, her brow puckering in confusion, "If you remember who Fakir is and you know about me, then you must remember who you are. You have a past and a future. What's keeping you trapped here?"

He laughed mockingly even as his glasses hid his eyes and his expression. "Who said anything about having a future? I followed my dream as far as I could, even when fate thwarted me, and now I can go no further. That is the curse the story laid on me: the curse of my own limitations."

"If there were no limits, if you could write these stories you want more than all the world—what then?"

"What then? What does that matter? I will have written them!"

"But then, your dream itself doesn't give you a future, can't imagine a future for you. Why do you hold on to a dream that brings you nothing but pain?"

He frowned, puzzled by her question. "Because it's a dream I've held all my life, to write, to change the world with my words. Ever since I could hold a quill I've tried and failed to spin tales, and when I at last found a way to change reality even a little, this was all I could manage," he gestured at the empty stage they danced on.

"But is this the only way you can change it? Is this the only way you can shape it? We need you, we need your hard-earned knowledge to help change the terrible reality that's taking hold within the walls of Goldcrown even now. Won't you work with us, to make a new future together?" She clasped her wings before her, asking for his help in gestures and in words.

"And that's why you've come," he said, trying to hold onto a resentment that seemed to slip with each graceful step she took. "You come when you need me and toss me aside otherwise? Wouldn't you have been happy to leave me as stone if you didn't need my help?"

"No!" she cried with such feeling that he was taken aback. "Your existence is precious to all those around you. I know," she said with such sadness as she raised a leg and it curved behind her as her body moved into a slow, graceful turn. "It hurts and aches when someone you love vanishes without a trace, and you miss them even if you don't remember what it is you're missing. Even if the details vanish, you know you have lost something, someone precious."

Sorrow she mimed, and loneliness, her wings tracing a track of invisible tears down her cheeks. "I would never want that to happen to you, or to those who love you. I don't want that to happen to anyone and that's why I'm asking you, won't you help us free the town from this curse?" she implored again, curving a wing before her.

He had not known, had not believed so much sincerity and goodwill could exist in all the world, let alone in one girl he barely knew. "And now I begin to see," he remarked, taking her outstretched wing and bowing over it, "just how you danced hope into Drosselmeyer's story itself. I can't help wanting to follow you. The hope you offer is such a tantalizing thing."

_He let her lead him out of darkness, out of stone and bitterness._

* * *

When Autor came to, he found himself lying on the practice room floor. A figure stood idly by the large, night-filled windows; the edges were blurry. He reached out with a blind hand and found, to his relief, his glasses placed beside him.

Fakir came into focus and Autor frowned, wondering if he had dreamed everything, "Was she even real?" he found himself asking without meaning to.

The dark-haired boy turned to him at the question, a grim, murderous expression on his face. "Very real, and so exhausted from dealing with you it is a miracle she didn't collapse from pain in the middle of it."

Fakir had insisted that Rue and Mythos hurry Duck back to the infirmary so she could rest even though there were no nurses or doctors there to care for her anymore, all of them having turned to marble. Mythos had said he would look in on the ravens and Rue had left, pushing Duck's wheelchair while the tired girl slumped into it, falling asleep almost immediately. Fakir had insisted on staying with the musician for whom they had risked so much.

Autor knit his brows, utterly lost. "Then why did she help me?" he asked, sitting up carefully—his limbs felt stiff still and he was unsure if it was from lying on the cold, hard practice room floor or from the lingering effects of the curse.

Fakir resisted the urge to strike the other boy at that question—he himself had asked it countless times now and no answer he came up with seemed worth the risk she had taken. "She might have forgiven you for your hand in this," he said evenly, "but I would gladly have left you as a statue for what you've done."

Autor sneered, "So much easier to hold me accountable for what you did, isn't it?"

"No, not that. I alone called forth the Darkest Knight from within me, I alone wielded that sword to my sorrow however much you wish the credit without the responsibility," Fakir said bitingly, knowing that this denial of Autor's manipulation would hurt the boy more than any accusation hurled at him. "But I trusted you and you betrayed me."

"And you thought only of yourself, writing for your own selfish ends and rubbing my face in it."

"What would you have me do, Autor?" Fakir snapped back wearily. Could they ever be allies again? Had they ever been allies or had their goals merely coincided for a time and he had been the only one foolish enough to think it more than that? "Cut off my hand and give it to you?"

"Haven't you known anything of temptation?"

Fakir closed his eyes for a moment, remembering just what had lured him down the path of the Darkest Knight. "I have known the temptation of despair," he responded at last, "but never that of power."

"And that's why it's wasted on you," Autor sighed. "But I'm beginning to realize now, that regret is a greater force than even that."

* * *

Rue was waiting for them outside Duck's room.

"How is she?"

"Resting," Rue sighed. "At least this time the wound didn't start bleeding again."

Fakir closed his eyes for a moment. "And Mythos?"

"Gone to feed the ravens."

A part of Fakir marveled at how after a lifetime of enmity he and Rue seemed to have fallen into such an easy understanding of each other. Perhaps it came from both of them having to look after such well-meaning but reckless individuals as Mythos and Duck. He stepped into the room, sitting beside Duck, waiting until she woke or until they all gathered and he would have no choice but to wake her.

As Fakir brushed a strand of hair out of Duck's face, Rue turned away, facing Autor who still stood in the doorway. "You asked me once, how I would go out of the world if it were ending. I give the question back to you now. What will you do?"

Autor looked beyond her for a moment, his eyes resting on the small slip of a girl in the hospital bed. "Help change things so it won't end, like she asked me to."

* * *

_(1) Based on an amalgamation of various versions of the myth of Pygmalion._


	18. Chapter 18

_Once upon a time, before time even began, when people lived in misery and sorrow because the moon and sun and stars were all locked away like gems too precious to be wasted on mortals, Raven who loved glittering things stole all the celestial treasures away. He tossed the sun up in the sky at his joy in its beauty and when the sun had set, he fastened the moon and then hung up the stars one by one so he could always look upon them._

_Of all his treasures, Raven loved the stars most of all because of how they shimmered always out of reach, so much fainter, so much more delicate than the burning embrace of the sun, than the pale kiss of the moon._

_And so the bird, as selfish as the long night humans had lived in, gave them light for no other reason than beauty, for no other reason than joy. (1)_

* * *

Fakir repeated the Tree's words, "Only when a winged princess calls out of darkness to darkness, another from memory to memory, and a newborn story arises from the ashes of the old will stone return to flesh, art to life."

They were in Duck's hospital room, which had somehow become the center of their operations. Duck lay propped against the pillows, Rue sitting beside her on the bed and Mythos standing nearby. Fakir leaned against the window sill, his back against the glass and Autor, thumbing through the stacks of books which still littered the floor, sat in Fakir's usual wooden chair.

Fakir continued, explaining what they had uncovered about the curse, how quickly it was spreading and the only way they had learned to counteract it, "We don't even know what the blasted ravens have to do with this," he finished with utter disgust.

"They are newborn," Mythos suggested.

But Autor was no longer listening at all. Given all the pieces of the mystery they had gathered so far, it was a wonder to see how the bookish musician made sense of them. His thoughts were so rapid, so fluid, so fully engaged in fitting together the different fragments, it almost felt like they could see the ideas themselves flit across his eyes.

"I wonder," Autor murmured at last more to himself than to the others, "if ravens, like words, are what you make them, you can fashion them into despair or into tricksters." He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie and added more loudly, "I have learned better than most that words don't have just one meaning. Perhaps we have been looking at the wrong raven or only part of it."

"I've had enough riddles for one day," Rue said dryly.

"Hugin and Munin," Autor responded in answer and at the irritated look she shot him, he expanded, "the ravens Thought and Memory that perch on the shoulders of Odin. They fly out at dawn and bring him news of the world. It is an old story. Drosselmeyer cast the Raven so completely as an antagonist that I had forgotten there are other possibilities."

He dug through the stacks of books, pulling up one with a dull cover, time and use having worn away the golden words of the title. " 'I always fear that Thought may not wing his way home, but my fear for Memory is greater,'" he read aloud, as if that should clear up any confusion._ (2)_

Mythos frowned, baffled. "I thought they were ravens of dark emotions expelled from my kingdom."

"Oh, they are," Autor assured him, setting aside the book and adjusting his glasses. "But they nest in thoughts and memories. Having been expelled from their own homes, they have made new ones in the long-buried memories of the people of Goldcrown."

"If they nest in memories, then," Rue considered, "first we must release the ravens from people's hearts before we can awaken their memories."

Fakir who had been silent until then, asked "And all that gibberish about the stories?"

Autor's eyes positively lit up. "Don't you see—it's all about the materiality of the text, it's physical existence! The old story itself can't be preserved, but it can be given a concrete part in the making of the new."

"What are you talking about?" Fakir lashed out, utterly at the end of his patience.

"Ashes! Ink!" And at the continuing incomprehension and frustration on the other's face added, "You always were a boor. Lampblack is one of the key components of certain inks," Autor explained as if talking to a small child, "We must simply use the ashes of the old manuscript to make the ink out of which you write the new story, the old giving birth to the new."

"Can it really be as simple as all that?" Rue asked. "We gather the ashes and you write a story with this ink and their memories return?"

"No," Fakir answered grimly, "We all know it isn't as simple as all that." He walked to Duck's side and brought up the point none of them had wished to talk about, had all been avoiding industriously in the hope that somehow ignoring it would render it unnecessary. "The winged princess, who dances at the center of it all."

Duck lay there silently, not having the energy to even argue with Fakir and convince him that her choice was that there _was_ no other choice. She couldn't leave everyone like this, frozen under the weight of what they could not remember, not when she herself knew how painful it was.

"There can be no other," Autor agreed reluctantly, trying with all his logic to come up with another solution and failing. "She must untangle fantasy from reality. She must dance and call out the ravens, she must dance and awaken the memories as you write. The story will magnify the effects so she won't have to do so for each individual but..."

Fakir looked down at Duck as she lay against the pillows, her face almost as pale as the sheets, pleading with his eyes for her to reconsider, but she would not meet his gaze.

The moment of tense silence stretched taut and finally snapped as Fakir stalked out of the room.

"Fakir!" Duck called out in a faint voice, but it was too late: he was already gone.

Rue took one look at the distressed expression on Duck's face and with a hasty, "I'll help him collect the ashes," she followed after him.

* * *

"Leave me alone," he said in a dull voice when he realized Rue was following him.

"The bookstore is in the other direction."

"Go away, you damned raven witch!" he barked, hoping to anger her into leaving him alone with his sorrow.

"We have to collect those ashes or will you not help her at all?" she asked in a cutting tone that suggested she had known she was right about him all along, that he was a selfish bastard who didn't care for anyone else at all. She hardly thought so ill of him any longer, but goaded him all the same, knowing exactly what to say to get under his skin, much as she had when they had been children. For though she could sympathize with his anguish, they had a task at hand and they could not afford to waver from it, Fakir least of all.

And with unerring precision, Rue had struck at the one thing that could make him set aside his anger. Princess Tutu was the ballerina destined to dance alone until she vanished; that was the fate Drosselmeyer had written for her, the fate Duck had accepted without a thought for herself. It was a fate he had tried and failed to change by making a promise to stay beside her forever. And now, when at last it had become a reality, he would not walk away, not make her carry this burden or dance this dance alone even if it hurried her to her end. Silently, he turned and followed Rue.

They walked silently through the eerie stillness of the town, both lost in thought, Fakir in his self-recriminations and Rue in thoughts of Duck. Rue knew that Duck would have sacrificed all for her, for Mythos once; Rue would not let her do so a second time. She would not sit by and watch Duck resign herself to this fate, and a determination for her friend as strong as her love for Mythos, settled in her heart.

They entered the darkened building, threading their way to the back room which had become the unlikely crypt of the descendents of Drosselmeyer's executioners. Rue pulled down a curtain from the window, and quietly began gathering the ashes from the grate, placing them onto the cloth. The distaste was clear in her expression as the soot covered her hands and dusted her clothes, but she continued at her task without hesitating.

"I swear I'll do everything in my power, in my blood to keep her safe," she said with quiet conviction before turning her sharp, unforgiving gaze on him, "so you make sure you write her a happy ending."

He met her eyes briefly, as if to ascertain whether he could rely on her. Finding a fierceness there he could trust, he knelt down to help her and they finished their task in silence.

* * *

Fakir, reluctantly admitting he would not be able to concentrate on writing the story if he was with them, agreed he would write in the library—Autor was already there, preparing the ink and paper—while the others would head to the center of the town, where the greatest concentration of statues was to be found.

"Fakir," Duck tried again as he helped her into the wheelchair once more. His eyes were covered by his hair and he had not spoken a single word to her since he and Rue had returned with a bundle of ashes tied in an old curtain. "I—I can't just leave them..." she trailed off, even though a small selfish part of her wished there was another way.

"I'll be there the whole time," he said softly, his gaze at last meeting hers was tender and pleading. "I'll be with you, writing. Don't you dare do anything more stupid than you have to."

She smiled up at him at that, one of her blinding heartfelt smiles, full of so much carefree innocence and pure joy, it made his heart jolt painfully. "I won't be afraid then," she swore, "as long as you're with me. With you beside me, I can do anything."

He hoped, desperately, that this promise to stay at her side wouldn't end as his last one had.

* * *

Duck, Rue, and Mythos stopped at the center of the town, staring at the statues in disbelief. Heavy, dark clouds had overtaken the sky, casting the entire town in shadow, and in that strange half-light, the pale marble statues almost seemed to glow. It was like some mad sculptor's dream, dozens upon dozens of perfect marble figures caught in all the movements of everyday life. Only a handful of people remained, and they walked around as if in a dream, not seeing the statues until one happened to block their paths.

Meanwhile, back in the library, Fakir sighed, eyeing the blank sheet before him unhappily.

"That is all you can do for her now," Autor said from behind him. "I have done all I could as well, and am trying to learn to be content with that."

Fakir picked up the quill. _The pendant eased her pain as much as it could..._ he began, grunting a little as some of her weariness and pain struck him, but he held onto the quill stubbornly with now aching fingers and continued.

* * *

In her chair, Duck tried to ignore how heavy her limbs felt, and as before, the pendant enveloped her in a soft warm light, taking away some of her pain. She prepared herself to rise from the wheelchair and transform.

"No." Mythos stopped her with a raised hand suddenly and she looked at him with questioning eyes. He looked down at her small, bundled figure. "We will find another way," he insisted adamantly, seeing just how frail, how ashen she still looked, each individual freckle standing out against her blanched skin, and remembering how easily she had crumpled after she had danced to draw Autor out of stone. And it had been as much at his word as at her insistence.

"We will find another way," he repeated and became the prince he was, taking on the form of Prince Siegfried, dressed in royal purple and purest white, the sun emblazoned on his chest. "My sword can cut through hearts without injuring those it pierces," the prince continued, drawing the swan-hilted blade. "Perhaps I can release the ravens from the statues. They are, after all, of my kingdom and so my responsibility."

* * *

Fakir sat back, surprised at the direction the story had taken. But after a moment's pause, he once more dipped the quill in the ink Autor had prepared and continued, writing out what Mythos wished, spinning with the thread Mythos had tossed into the current of events, thanking the prince silently in his heart.

_The Prince did not care if it would take him an eternity, freeing a raven from the heart of each and every statue, but if he could lighten the burden of the girl who...._

* * *

Mythos approached the statue of a young man selling flowers at his cart, forever frozen with a rose stem in his fingers for a long-vanished customer. The prince raised his sword carefully, gently to the florist's stone breast. The flawless marble parted and Mythos caught a glimpse of a raven hidden within, but the bird cawed petulantly, refusing to move from its nest within the statue's heart, and soon the marble had covered it once more.

He tried, again and again, with different statues, but although each time the stone parted evenly and easily, he could not coax the ravens out of the memories in which they had gone to roost. And Duck, though she was grateful to Mythos for trying to protect her, braced herself to rise, to dance.

But Rue, squeezing the small hand that lay on the armrest of the wheelchair reassuringly, stepped forward before Duck could. No, she would not let Duck shoulder the weight of all their happiness by herself once more. "I know something of ravens and darkness," she said. "The raven's blood still within me, the heritage I have tried so desperately to flee, gives me the power to become Princess Kraehe, but I will not be ruled any longer by my own shadows—I will rule them."

And so saying, she stepped forward onto the stage the story had created for them: a town square, exquisite marble statues all about them. Not torturous briars tearing her skin with agony, but a flurry of black, silken feathers materialized, enveloping Rue. When the swirling feathers parted, the soft ebony down drifting away on the wind, before them stood the Princess of Ravens in all her glory and majesty: wild and fierce and free.

Her arms spreading open like an elegant black swan landing, her body gracefully slid into a seemingly endless series of _fouettés en tournant_; she spun again and again as if it were the most natural movement in the world, turning sharply but fluidly in her black toe-shoes, her dance at once powerful, at once enthralling.

She danced the dance of the raven, her arms outstretched and raised as claws, but they were playful more than menacing. A faint smudge of darkness rose on the horizon and soon a small flock of fledgling ravens came flying towards her from the Academy as if answering her call. The birds flocked to her, dancing about behind her, all of them together darting and swooping, sketching figures like wings at her back and she held one arm out to Mythos, "Will you dance with me, my Prince, even as I am?"

Mythos had stood unmoving, stunned when Princess Kraehe first reappeared on this fateful stage. And yet, there was the teasing smile she curved at him, the vulnerable look in her wine-red eyes as even now she steeled herself for his rejection at this form which was as much a part of her as her love for ballet. He sheathed his sword and reached for her outstretched hand.

* * *

_And together they danced, the Fairytale Prince and the Princess of Ravens, a _pas de deux_ that sketched their love for each other, a dance born out of the desire to protect the girl who had sacrificed all her own happiness for theirs before...._

Autor, reading over Fakir's shoulder exclaimed, "Just what's going on out there? Did they even listen to the plan? What kind of interpretation is this? Although I suppose the ravens are flying about her like wings and she is calling out of darkness."

But Fakir merely continued writing, the nib of his pen racing across the paper in a dance of its own, _About them flocked ravens, more and more, flying out of all the hearts, stone and flesh, where they did not belong...._

* * *

Duck watched in awe as Rue and Mythos danced, and she thought again, as she had the first time she had seen them dance, that they made such a beautiful, perfect couple. And somehow, unbidden, the thought crossed her mind that should she dance with Fakir, it would be a disaster; although he was just as skilled as Mythos, she herself was as clumsy as she had ever been. Did that mean she and Fakir weren't a perfect couple? _Will I ever make a fitting partner for him? _The small but insidious voice of doubt crept into her mind. And with that doubt came the fear that she might never find out the answer to this question, for though the pendant helped, she could not ignore the way her body ached and trembled from pain and exertion. A weak part of her whispered that this stage on which he wrote and upon which she would dance might mark all the time she would ever have with him.

While she had been lost in such oppressive thoughts, more and more ravens flocked about the dancing prince and princess, wild and chaotic.

"Dark emotions you may be," said the Princess of Ravens, addressing the birds that had come to pay her court, "but I have learned, coming here again, that it is impossible to live without shadows. If you try to run away from them, you become nothing but a shadow yourself. Won't you return with us, to your true homes?"

"My subjects have lived without you far too long," Mythos added, "Will you not fly home out of these nests of memory where you have no place and back to the hearts where you belong?"

But the birds seemed not to heed their words and continued to circle the dancing pair, eying the prince and princess cautiously, for having been thrust out of their true nests once the ravens were unwilling to trust blindly. Through the circle of darting raven wings, Duck caught a glimpse of the Prince and Princess's faces, their expressions growing troubled as the dance continued but the ravens—all save the few they had been caring for over the past few days—kept their distance. As if sensing the budding uncertainty in the couple's hearts, ravens began to break away from the flock as the pull of their newfound nests called out to them, pulling them back into the townspeople's memories.

"Oh no!" Duck gasped as she saw all of Rue and Mythos' hard work begin to unravel, her hand instinctively reaching for the pendant at her throat. She stood up, her vision blackening around the edges at the sudden movement, and waited for the jewel's light to wash over her so she could reach her friends, but nothing happened. Duck froze where she stood, unable to believe that the stone had failed her.

"The pendant! But why—!" her fingers tightened around the stone, desperately wishing it would transform her into the ballerina who could dance for everyone's future. But even as she thought the words, a voice added, everyone's future but her own. Weakened both physically and emotionally, Duck fell to her knees onto the unyielding cobblestones, her hands still grasping the stone as she remained only, merely, a girl.

* * *

_The ravens flew over the girl as they began to make their way back into the townspeople's buried, forgotten memories. Would she fail them all, even after the Prince and Princess had tried so hard to help protect her, would she betray their trust and faith in her? Would she deny the townsfolk their future just so she could have hers, a future that she didn't even think she deserved?_

Fakir gritted his teeth as the helplessness in Duck's heart pulled at his own through the link created by the pendant, each shard of her doubt burning like ice in his veins, leading to the same despair that had given birth to the Darkest Knight. "No! You mustn't!" Fakir whispered through clenched teeth, his quill and the story forgotten.

Only Autor's voice reading over his shoulder called Fakir back to himself. "What are you doing? Write to her, damn it!" Autor shouted, pressing Fakir's nerveless fingers around the battered quill. "You can't let her despair pull you into yours! You have to lead her out of it!"

Fakir closed his eyes, pushing away that overwhelming darkness he knew too well with what had saved him from it before: memories of Duck. The memory of her blue eyes, as clear and endless as a summer sky before him, his ink-stained fingers pushed the quill in his hand forward once more.

_The writer who had once been a knight, with a sword and heart as dark as __midnight__, called out to the girl who had given him back light: _I won't let our story end this way._ And with those words, he gave half his strength, half his life to her so she would not burn all of hers while he wrote and she danced for her future, for their future._

Fakir slumped over the desk tiredly as the words took effect, his strength seeping out of him; doggedly, he continued writing.

_Their love, two shades of crimson now entwined was what gave physical form to Princess Tutu. For her to become the winged princess, she must believe in him, and in herself as well, for he would always believe in her. She must have hope in their future together._

* * *

Duck opened her hands when she felt the pendant radiating a familiar warmth. At first she could not place this feeling, but as the echo of Fakir's words reached her, she recalled this warmth: it was the comfort of his embrace, the concern in his eyes, the scalding of his tears. She felt energy flood into her, limbs that had felt leaden and unable to sustain the exacting movements of ballet even with the previous help of the pendant, now felt lighter, stronger.

Fakir was risking so much for their future, she could not do any less. Wrapping her fingers around the pendant once more, Duck held the egg-shaped jewel close and lifted herself from the ground. She stepped forward, towards the Prince and Princess dancing desperately still, and the foot that touched the ground was clad in a satin toeshoe.

Lifting her face, Princess Tutu reached out to the memories the ravens had found buried deep in the hearts of the townsfolk, and danced for them. Stretching her wings wide, the light that spread from her called to the ravens in their love of glittering things and they halted in their flight back into the townspeople's memories. _Remember,_ Princess Tutu implored the people of Goldcrown with each step she took.

"Remember all the people and all the memories you have lost, for even the smallest one is too precious to lose," she pleaded, remembering her own pain at all she had forgotten, for even when she had lost the memories themselves, the pain of loss had persisted. "Because the past is as precious as the future and you can't have one without the other, like light and shadow they can only exist together."

"You must come back to the kingdom of too much light," Kraehe implored the ravens, her certainty returning with Tutu's words, "without you all that light has no meaning."

"Without you, my people cannot be whole," Siegfried agreed.

The Prince and Princess watched as the ravens, now guided by their unwavering hearts, gathered once more around them in the town square, now swooping and joining them in their dance. Beginning with the fledglings they had cared for, one by one and then two by two, in ever- increasing numbers, ravens began flying upward in an arc out of Goldcrown and into the sky: a vast bridge of raven wings breaking through the dark clouds that had hovered over the town ever since the curse of the story had befallen it. Sunlight streaked down on the town and its inhabitants. With their wings, the ravens freed the sun and it shone down once more on Goldcrown.

Piece by piece, under the touch of the sunlight, the statues thawed from stone to flesh. The townsfolk, flesh and blood once more, drifted into sleep, drowsily curling up on vendors' carts and restaurant tables and even on the cobblestones themselves.

* * *

_Out of darkness, they followed a great white bird..._

Fakir wrote so rapidly the ink was in danger of smearing, but he did not care. With the last word written, he threw aside the quill, grabbed the sheaf of papers, and bone-weary as he was, dashed out of the library, Autor just behind him.

* * *

Mythos caught Duck as she fell, too tired to even maintain her transformation now that the strength Fakir had lent her during the course of the story had ebbed away. Rue helped Duck adjust herself into the wheelchair. Duck closed her eyes as all her twinges and aches came back at once.

Without the flowing words from his quill to act as a link to Duck, fear and dread followed at Fakir's heels as he ran towards the town square. "She can't be—she isn't—" Fakir stuttered out, unable to voice the horrible thought, when he caught sight of them.

But Duck's eyes fluttered open as she heard his voice and she smiled, "Fakir." He knelt before her chair, and held her close, burying his face in the curve of her neck and he felt her words in the quivering of her body before he heard them. "The story," she asked, "is it finally over?"

"Yes," he answered against her skin, reassuring himself as much as her. "And you're still here with me."

* * *

_(1) A loose adaptation of the trickster/creator Raven who appears in the folklore of various Native American tribes._

_(2) Based on Norse mythology; the line that Autor quotes is from The Lay of Grimnir, also called the Grimnismáls_

* * *

**The End**


	19. Epilogue

**A/N:** So, it took 3 years, but this fic is finally over! If it weren't for **Mangaka-chan**'s betaing and encouragement to continue, the second half of this fic would have been written even more slowly. I also want to thank her for her offer to collaborate and we're excited to present This Pendent Heart, the light novel. Each chapter is illustrated beautifully by Mangaka-chan (remove all spaces): **http:// sites. google. com/site/thispendentheart/**. The site will be updated with new illustrated chapters regularly. I've also uploaded the revised versions of the earlier chapters on FFN, so don't be surprised if you find new scenes, chapter divisions and such in them, but I would really recommend checking them out on the website because Mangaka-chan's art is just stunning.

A big thank you to **Moon Shadow Magic** for her untiring, patient help with betaing for revision. She's helped me make this story presentable and I really appreciate all the time and effort she put into doing so. All mistakes that remain are, of course, my own.

And I want to thank all of you for reading and leaving feedback and encouragement and inspiration. I don't know if I would have managed to write it all out otherwise. Hope you enjoyed the ride.

So long, and thanks for all the fish,  
LunaSphere

**Epilogue**

* * *

_Once upon a time, there was a girl._

* * *

Mythos put his hand down on the table, his fingers covering the words Rue had been reading. She looked up startled, her mind still caught in the overly formal and stiff language of the royal petitions and appeals she and Mythos had been working through. Various advisers and scribes and petitioners buzzed about the room making something of a nuisance of themselves as they brought in more proposals or discussed specific cases or bustled about to appear important or merely tried to catch a glimpse of the royal couple. It was enchanting to see how much the prince and princess were in love, even when flooded with paperwork.

"Come, my princess," Mythos cajoled, with a raffish smile, "let's hide away from our councilors for a moment."

Rue eyed the piles of paper that still covered her cluttered desk as distastefully as if they were insects, and happily took her prince's hand. The idea of sneaking away made it all the more appealing, even if they both knew it was a fiction, and only for a moment. She rose, the long skirt of her wine-red gown rippling like water with her movements; while as rich and elegant as any of her ball-gowns, it was a simple dress, comfortable to work in, especially in this summer heat. She'd had it made in the image of her ballet practice dress, the same elegant cut, the same simple ruffling sleeves, a small and perhaps frivolous reminder of who she was to herself.

Mythos led her out of the council chamber through a small, discreet servants' entrance and those who noticed had the good sense to pretend that they didn't. Out in the corridor, and no doubt under the eye of some dutiful guard or other, they kissed.

For a space, they simply held each other, savoring this moment alone. Ever since they had returned to the fairytale kingdom, Rue and Mythos had found their hands full. Without their darker emotions, those in the fairytale kingdom had been living as much in a waking dream as the people of Goldcrown had when Drosselmeyer's story controlled the town. The kingdom was no longer the smooth, well-oiled machine that it had been for as long as Mythos could remember. There were innovators and artists and change now, instead of a kingdom frozen in a moment of perfect happiness and tranquility. But the sudden jumble of emotions at times also led to disputes, disagreements, and even crimes of passion and premeditation. Such things were unheard-of before and in their very novelty struck fear and uncertainty in his subjects' hearts. His people needed his leadership and his guidance now as they never had before.

At last Mythos sighed, "I suppose we should return. I keep hoping they will run out of petitions, but it seems all of my kingdom wants to set into motion at once the changes and ideas that never occurred to them after all their wildness and passion had fled with the ravens."

"You know, not all those ideas are rubbish," Rue said, just a touch of sarcastic disbelief in her voice. "One of them even proposed opening a school for the arts. Perhaps I can see to that and leave you to your stuffy councilors," she teased even as she knew she couldn't leave Mythos to such a dire fate on his own. After all, she was the one who had rescued him from facing it alone in the first place. She had startled all his advisers and then charmed them by sweeping into the council room looking for Mythos—he had been holed up in there for countless hours and she had tired of waiting—and then insisting it was as much her sovereign duty as his to consider the petitions of their subjects.

"Well, perhaps I shall help you oversee this school, if for no other reason than to sneak away on occasion to dance with you there," Mythos smiled back as Rue tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and they stepped into the chaos of the council chamber once more, stately and regal as if they had not just stolen away for a tryst.

* * *

It was a slow, tedious story to write and did not at all cooperate. But Autor had said that stories should live in the hearts of people, not people in the hearts of stories, and so Fakir kept writing. Slowly and meticulously spinning out all the threads, starting from that first tangled web: Drosselmeyer's life. And then strand by strand, he wove in the Prince's story, the Raven's, and Goldcrown's. So many threads in this tale, Rue's, Autor's, his own, all the townsfolk's tales. But the one that seemed to gleam like a thread of gold in a tapestry worn with time was Tutu's. It wove in and out from all the others, at times seeming to wink out of existence, but always returning, tying them all together.

Occasionally, Autor would come to see them both at the hospital, Duck because she had not yet been released, and Fakir because he spent every moment he could there, by her side.

"Have you thought about publishing?" Autor had asked him one day, his voice low as Duck dozed lightly in the hospital bed.

Fakir had frowned, startled by the question. "Whatever for? Isn't writing it enough?"

"How else will the story live in the hearts of people? It will be there, for them to read, and believe if they want to. Besides," Autor continued more practically, "this should help guarantee that even if the manuscript itself is damaged or altered, the story can't be manipulated."

Fakir nodded and the two fell into an almost companionable silence.

"A new story…it will need a new title, to distinguish itself from the old tale, but also to mark a new beginning," Autor said, after a space.

Fakir, his eyes fixed on the sheaf of papers in his hands, did not reply immediately. Duck shifting in her sleep drew his gaze to her. Color had returned to she cheeks and she had regained much of her strength, but now she chafed all the more at the restrictions placed on her by the hospital staff. The number of times Duck had asked if she was well enough to dance yet had worn thin both their patience and Fakir's own . But for once, having nothing more weighing on her than the upcoming performance of _Sleeping Beauty_, she couldn't help wanting to throw her all into dance. For although she had loved ballet from that very first moment she had seen the heartless prince dancing, there had always been something else before, something more important than her own practicing for her to worry about. Mythos and Rue's promise to visit for her performance spurred her on even more; she respected them both as dancers and wanted them to be proud of her.

The peaceful look on her sleeping face, so at odds with her usual exuberance and animation, brought a small smile to Fakir's face. "I'm thinking of calling it _Princess Tutu_" he said at last, "after the character whose story it was never meant to be."

* * *

Fakir sat back in his carrel at the library, shaking out fingers cramped from writing before returning to his task once more. He had taken to coming to the academy library to work soon after Duck had been released from the hospital and cleared for light exertion. It was much easier trying to write without her there. It wasn't just her constant questions and interruptions, but his own desire to talk to her, to spend time with her—as if he were trying still to make up for those missing months when she had returned to being a duck once more, as if trying desperately to overwrite that time with new, happier memories—that had gotten in the way of his productivity.

So now Duck was off observing the rehearsals for _Sleeping Beauty_, and if the doctors were satisfied with the progress of her recovery, she'd be allowed to participate next week. And here he was, alone in the perpetual gloom of the library, weaving this tale. It was lonely without her. Nowhere near as lonely as it had been back before this mess started, when she had returned to being a duck and he felt he was losing her entirely. It was foolish sentimentality, he told himself firmly; he'd see her at the end of the day, when she was finished with practice and he was finished with writing.

_It needs to be done_, he told himself, _the story needs to be written_. Because, while everyone had their memories back, Fakir wanted to take no chances. He would write out all that had happened, give voice to the town's past and put to rest the past's mistakes.

Part of this new story now lay on the desk beside Fakir and yet there was still so much more to be written. And so the days passed. All those touched by the curse of the previous tale had been healed and now _The Prince and the Raven_ was no more than a collective dream to most of the townsfolk. Some dismissed these memories out of hand, as dreams, as bouts of madness, as stories heard and remembered but not lived. Others seemed to accept some memories and reject others in a manner that was incomprehensible to Fakir. Others still were willing to believe all and Fakir was more grateful than he could express that Charon was one of these. Part of him wished Charon would never have to know just how low Fakir had sunk, but he also could not bear to lie to Charon, to hide from Charon how much he had wronged the man who had only ever loved him as a son.

Fakir had felt his heart in his throat when he faced Charon's grave expression and recounted all, sparing nothing of what he had become, what he had done. And still, somehow, Charon had forgiven him, had embraced him as his son. It startled him still, how kind people could be, Charon, Mythos, Duck....

"Still not done yet?"

Surprised by the voice, Fakir blotted the sheet before him and looked up to find Duck poking her head around a bookcase, looking half-eager and half-sheepish at her own excitement.

Fakir grimaced, setting aside his pen and gesturing vaguely at the page before him, "Hardly. I've just gotten to the part where they cut Drosselmeyer's hands off. It's strange to think after all the stories he spun, now there's one being spun about him."

"I feel bad for you, cooped up in here all day," Duck sympathized, looking at the books that lay open on Fakir's desk and the mess of papers in front of him. Then, trying on her most winsome smile, she asked, "So do you want to take a break and practice with me?"

"Hmph," Fakir grunted. "I don't need more than four or five hours of practice a day. You're the one who needs to put in more time."

"But I..." the rest of her sentence was lost as she mumbled, embarrassed, her eyes on the floor.

"What was that?" he teased.

She looked up at him, now blushing and glaring at once. "I said I miss you. I mean we see each other but, you know, spending time with you—oh, never mind," she said, breaking off in frustration and embarrassment, her cheeks puffed out in a pout.

If this was just foolish sentimentality, at least he wasn't the only one losing to it.

"Well," he said, picking up a book and a few sheets of paper, "maybe I can work on this part in the practice room with you."

* * *

Duck, with Pique and Lillie peeking over and around her shoulders, snuck a glance at the full house from the edge of the curtains. The show would start soon and she could already feel the jitters of stage fright setting in. She had practiced and practiced but the thought of going out there before so many eyes made her knees feel a little wobbly.

"Ohhhh!" Lillie squealed not-so-softly in Duck's ear. The rustling and light chatter of the audience, however, prevented her from being heard beyond the stage. "Are you nervous, Duck?" she asked sympathetically, shaking her friend's shoulder in time with her words. "Are you afraid you're going to forget your steps in front of our famous alumni who've come especially to see this performance?"

"She's not the only one," Pique quipped, pointing at Lillie's own slightly trembling hands.

"Oh, hush!" Lillie huffed back, shoving her hands behind her back. "Anyway, rumor has it, soon Miss Rue's going to be running her own ballet academy somewhere. Maybe if we flunk out of Goldcrown Academy, she'll take pity on us and take us in. I don't see her or Mythos anywhere though."

"You're making her more nervous!" Pique hissed.

"But I'm making _me _less nervous!" Lillie sing-songed back.

While her friends argued behind her, Duck had been scanning the faces of the audience. She had been looking forward to Rue and Mythos coming to her performance since the very moment they had left, soon after the curse had been lifted from the town, but they seemed to be nowhere to be found. She managed to spot Fakir at least, sitting mere feet away from her, in a seat that faced the edge of the stage rather than the center as she had expected. "What are you doing there?" she tried to mouth to him without drawing too much attention to herself. He raised his eyebrows at her antics and she reddened as a few girls sitting near him caught sight of her and giggled.

Duck hastily backed away from the curtain, but as she stepped back, walking across the stage and then backstage, she realized why he had chosen that particular seat. The wobbliness left her knees, and with a definite spring in her step, she linked elbows with Pique and Lillie, and boldly declared, "We're going to be great! Now let's go break some legs or whatever it is."

"Duck, that's for _acting_," Pique pointed out.

"Are you worried you'll trip and fall and then—"

Duck just grinned broadly.

* * *

Mythos and Rue quietly made their way down the aisle just as the curtain rose. They had meant to leave with plenty of time to chat with Fakir and Duck before the performance, but one obligation or another kept delaying their departure. At least they had made it in time for the performance and fortunately, special seats in the front had been reserved for them as distinguished alumni of the academy. After seating them, the usher quietly slipped away and both began discreetly looking for Fakir among the audience, surprised that he wasn't nearby.

Surely Fakir would not miss Duck's performance. Rue was already thinking how she would making him regret his selfish disregard for Duck's feelings, when Mythos pointed to the end of the row they were seated in. Rue raised her eyebrows, surprised Fakir hadn't had a better seat reserved for himself. She felt a pang of something like guilt for misjudging him yet again, but dismissed it—an entire lifetime of rivalry and ill-will wasn't going to disappear overnight. Although, perhaps she shouldn't be quite so ready to expect the worst from him.

It was at the beginning of the third act that she realized just _why _Fakir had chosen that particular seat and felt any lingering resentment she had for him dissolve entirely. On stage, all the guests had arrived to celebrate Princess Aurora's marriage to Prince Florimund. The ladies of the palace greeted the guests with airy gestures of welcome and joy. And there, amongst the parade of dancers, in the very back and near the edge of the stage with the young hand-maidens—right in front of the bad seat Fakir had chosen—was Duck.

Most of the audience had eyes only for the center of the stage, where the ballerinas moved in intricately geometric choreography, captivated by the grace of their interlocking gestures, their carefully harmonized _jete en tournant_, but Fakir's gaze rested only on that one red-haired hand-maiden, dressed like the others in the pale rosy colors of dawn and dancing on the fringes of the stage, the pendant at her neck glimmering now and then as she moved.

Duck did not have very many steps, but his eye, trained and honed in ballet as it was, could see the careful precision behind her small, graceful movements. It was the grace of ballet—not a natural elegance, but one that was painstakingly trained into the body. Her positions were proper and her pointe work, although brief, showed the result of arduous practice. Rue's tutelage while they were still under the curse of the story, and Duck's own unending practice since had paid off. It was clear in the smile that never left her face or her eyes, that despite how minor her role was, she loved every moment of it.

And that made Fakir smile too, because he knew that this, more than anything, was what her heart desired. When the ballet instructor had asked Fakir as an exceptional student if he was interested in participating in this production even at this late date, Fakir had surprised nearly everyone by declining the honor. His refusal had fueled all sorts of speculation among the student body, but his reasoning was really quite simple. Given his own level of skill, he wouldn't be able to dance at all with someone like Duck. If he could not dance with Duck, he was more than happy to sit and watch her dance on her own.

* * *

After the performance was over, Rue discovered yet another advantage to Fakir's choice of seating when she saw his seat was already empty. _How awfully sly of him, trying to be the first person to get backstage_, Rue sniffed, though her lips betrayed a smile.

Behind the drawn curtains the dancers exited the stage, still riding the high of the performance even as exhaustion began to set in. Adoring students and family members clustered about the performers, the principal dancers in particular surrounded by little islands of well-wishers.

Fakir had ducked behind a set of stage props, staying in the shadows and out of sight as the crowd moved away, toward the exits. Duck was the last to leave the stage, taking one last smiling look at the beautifully painted set before descending the steps.

"You don't have to keep staring at it," Fakir said emerging, and from behind his back produced a small bouquet of flowers that he had hidden before the performance, "you'll have plenty of opportunities to be on that stage in the future."

At the sight of the bouquet offered to her, Duck blushed, her eyes sparkling; she reddened even further when she touched Fakir's hand to accept the flowers and he grasped her free hand in his own.

"And I have you to thank for that," Duck said, standing on her toes to give him a quick peck on the cheek. She broke into a teasing smile as Fakir's cheeks matched her own.

By the time Rue and Mythos had finally made their way through the throng of eager students about them, the dancers, save for Duck, had already filed out of the dressing rooms.

At Rue's not very carefully suppressed smirk and Mythos' bright smile, Fakir cleared his throat and replied defensively, "Charon told me I should get her flowers. Although, I can say for sure" he teased, his eyes softening as he turned to Duck once more, their hands still laced together, "you're still far from being a prima donna."

Duck, blushing a brilliant shade of scarlet once more but this time for different reasons, elbowed Fakir quite firmly as Mythos and Rue laughed.

Rue gave the smaller girl a tight hug. "Duck, you were wonderful!"

"Do you really think so, Rue?" Duck asked, her voice unsure. The teasing from Fakir and what she considered high praise from Rue was starting to make Duck nervous again—it was almost impossible to believe that such talented dancers could praise her, clumsy, inelegant Duck.

"It is true, Duck. As a prince I am a man of my word," Mythos assured her, offering her a small bow.

"Yes, and someday you can come dance at my school, as a prima ballerina," Rue smiled sincerely as her prince nodded in agreement.

At this Duck remembered what Lillie had said before the performance and her voice echoed the excitement in her eyes. "That's right! I heard from Lillie that you were opening a school. Will you be teaching there? It'll be a lot of work, won't it?"

Mythos chuckled. "It will take some time as we've only began planning for the new academy, but I think such a school might help my citizens learn to live with their darkness." He continued, a touch of sorrow in his voice, "Just as we have learned to live with the ravens in our own hearts."

Both Rue and Fakir started at the statement, but their expressions lightened when Mythos smiled at Rue and Duck gave Fakir's hand a reassuring squeeze. The guilt, Rue knew from her own bitter experience, would never vanish, never wear away entirely, but it seemed both the prince and his knight were learning to live with the shadows of their hearts rather than being ruled by them.

Seeing Fakir relax again, Duck's thoughts turned to the fledglings she had tended and all of their kindred who had returned to the world they belonged to. "What happened to the ravens? Did they all return to people's hearts?"

"Some of them," Mythos replied. "But others, it appears, came out of the land itself, some seem to be nothing more than birds, and others scraps of magic."

"It's been quite a mess, actually," Rue added. "In fact, a handful of them insist on following us everywhere, even when we travel. They made an awful racket when they tried to nest in a tree right by our window." Something in Rue's tone made Duck and Fakir pity the ravens more so than the royal couple the birds had chosen to pester, for they could only imagine the upbraiding handed out by this indomitable princess, and not for the first time the four friends silently marveled at how much things had changed.

* * *

The next day Duck, with Fakir at her side, saw Rue and Mythos off in their swan-drawn chariot by lake just outside the walls of the town. Mythos and Rue were accompanied by the handful of ravens that had followed them to Goldcrown; the birds were now darting about, trying to get a rise out of the regal swans until Rue chided the mischievous birds into a semblance of good behavior.

One raven in particular fluttered towards Duck, and she was sure it was one of the fledglings she had cared for not too long ago. It settled on her shoulder for just a moment, trying to preen Duck's hair as the girl laughed. To everyone's great surprise, when Duck offered the wayward birds a handful of sunflower seeds she had brought as a present, none of them nipped at her fingers.

With some reluctance, the friends said their farewells and smiling, promised to visit again soon. The prince and princess both looked surer of themselves, of each other, as they left for their kingdom this time. As Duck waved to Rue and Mythos' chariot in the distance, strong arms wrapped around her, and she leaned back into Fakir's chest, thinking that perhaps this—her life and what she thought she could do—had changed most of all.

"Fakir, do you want to dance?"

Fakir's eyes looked down at Duck in surprise at the sudden question. "You really never get tired of dancing, do you?" He smiled teasingly even as he knew the answer.

Duck nodded. "But today I want to dance only for myself; I want to dance with you."

The pendant at her throat caught and gleamed in the early morning light, the rich shades of red entwined in a jewel shaped in the promise of a new beginning. And in the distance one last raven winked like a smudge of darkness, its flight seeming to sketch a path between Goldcrown and the fairytale kingdom, because after all, reality and story are neighboring realms.


End file.
